


We Face Back All the Way

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fallen London, Body Horror, F/F, Tentacle Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2018-01-06 14:11:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1107797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose comes back from the Tomb Colonies… changed. And with a problem with a bald devil. </p><p>Kanaya, herself a devil, ends up in the unusual position of trying to save Rose’s soul from her old mentor. Alas. Complications. So compelling. Such little porn. Very wow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Face Back All the Way

**Author's Note:**

> More Homestuck than Fallen London, but my great fortune is that I have a reckless disregard for factual, historical, and fantastical accuracy. 
> 
> This is 90% self-indulgence and... 10% whatever else I wanted. Hope you like it.

Ms. Lalonde has returned from the Tomb Colonies and has been seen in the company of devils. Kanaya only hears this when she is working in the Botanical Professor’s gardens on her biweekly visit. She has come to check on the weepingberry plants the Botanical Professor specially imported from a circle of Hell to the Neath. Kanaya is still known as the Sanguine Horticulturalist for her skill at cultivating weepingberries, among other things. 

She is squeezing nectar from a seed pod inside a glass house, hot and damp as any circle of Hell. Both she and the Botanical Professor are dressed in plain shirts and skirts and smocks, and are wearing safety glasses. Over the glasses, Kanaya squints at the Botanical Professor and says, “Which devils?” Being a devil herself, she knows them all, and also knows all facets of interest a devil may take, either the grubby reach for Ms. Lalonde’s soul, or the longer game: her societal connections, her exquisitely awful novel, her easy access to true grape wine. Kanaya squeezes the pod so hard it bursts. 

“Darn it, Ms. Maryam!” says the Botanical Professor. Her ponytail droops heavily in the heat, but still wags when she shakes her head. “I don’t know. I didn’t see it myself, I only heard it from Dave. He said Rose is trying to keep a lower profile this time.” 

“I should hope so.” Ms. Lalonde, fair-haired beacon of wretched decision-making, was sent away to the Tomb Colonies after doing unspeakable things to a Rubbery Man—well, not so unspeakable. She was stroking his facial tentacles. She was holding his hand! That’s nearly the same as exhibitionist fellatio on the outrage scale. 

Kanaya pops another fruit pod and lets the juices drip down her wrist, soak into her sleeve. She sucks at the sleeve of her dress and thinks, Later, I will push a Rubbery Man in front of someone’s velocipede. It will make her feel better. 

“Oooh, did she not tell you she was back?” 

“No. She makes a habit of failing to consult with me.” It may also be that Mr. Strider the elder has taken to burning her letters before they can reach his daughter. Some prejudices never die. “Tell me, is she at her usual residence?” 

“Yes. I think. Dirk’s place was ransacked by the Masters’ men again. Don’t pinch the fruits so hard! We’re trying to coax the nectar out of them, not pulverize them.” 

“You are letting your plants become overgrown,” she tries to say, but Harley bats her hands away from the plant and tells her to go away; she’ll deliver the weepingberry nectar to the Brass Embassy herself. “You’re the soul of generosity,” Kanaya says, then witlessly adds, “A generosity that would remain with you if you would allow me to do you the privilege of unencumbering you from your—” 

“Nah,” the Professor says. 

*** 

She changes out of her botanical clothes and back into clothes more befitting of a devil: a suit of spidersilk, a modest hat to hide her eyes from the unwary populace, shoes that smile at those who look too long at them. She carries in her hand an infernal invention meant for felling trees, but also useful for chopping certain orders of nuns and monks. The kinds that lay in ambush. 

It is not a long way to the Lalonde’s house from the University. The townhome is respectable, or at least the appearance of it is. Mr. Strider the elder is a known seditionist, Mr. Strider the younger often seen slouching in neighborhoods of deplorable repute, Dr. Lalonde a Benthic engineer with unsavory habits of many kinds, and Ms. Lalonde interested only in Rubbery Men and Clay Men and Unfinished Men and zailors and, yes, devils. Very interested in the subject of devils. 

The last time they saw each other, it was in the last week of spring, at the height of the toxic mold season. They had argued, she had left, and a month later Ms. Lalonde was shipped off to the Tomb Colonies. Ms. Lalonde had sent her letters over the months, but it was more difficult responding than Kanaya anticipated. Letters would be stolen, or she’d suddenly be assaulted by spiders on her way to the post. But they have made up by now, or nearly. Not enough, she thinks, if Ms. Lalonde has not told her of her return. 

Kanaya feels herself flush from frustration. She adjusts her gloves; they are too tight at the wrist. She continues her stroll, weaving between one lamplit face after another. She takes advantage of having both hands free to trip a Rubbery Man in the way of a carriage. It is not as pleasurable as maiming one with a velocipede, but in the ensuing chaos she finds a young, frightened urchin and relieves him of his soul. There: her quota has been met. She can go to Ms. Lalonde without thinking about the numbers for the day.

She arrives at the Lalonde’s house in a nervous mood. If Dr. Lalonde or Mr. Strider the elder answer the door, she knows, she will be in trouble, because she has nothing with which to bribe either of them. But she is lucky today: the maid takes her to Mr. Strider the younger, who greets her with a nod of the head. Mr. Strider does not try to kiss her or even shake her hand. He does this in part because he is a half-American rube, and also because he is convinced she will steal his soul if their bare skin touches. 

“How long has she been back?” Kanaya asks. 

“Few days. Gotta say, I’m glad to see you around. That latest devil she’s hanging with is a real creep.”

“Who is this devil,” Kanaya says. Mr. Strider shrugs. He moves his hand over his head. It takes a moment. “A _bald_ devil?” 

“You mean you all really do have perfect coifs? Damn. If soullessness gives you great hair, I’m signing mine away on the dotted line.” 

“It does.” Mr. Strider laughs. “I am not joking,” she says severely. 

“Hahaha. Damn, woman.” He walks faster. At the door to the library he knocks and immediately scurries away. 

Ms. Lalonde opens the door. “My favorite devil,” she says with a smile. 

“I am still your favorite?” Kanaya sniffs, and kisses her on the cheek, twice. Ms. Lalonde holds the candle further out so Kanaya won’t burn her clothes; the heat prickles on her arm. For a moment she considers embracing Ms. Lalonde, but instead she says, “You have not treated me as such.” 

“I said ‘favorite devil,’ not ‘favorite sentient creature.’ Besides, there is no inconspicuous way to call you. Imagine the scandal if I were to appear at the gates of the Brass Embassy with an armful of mushrooms.” 

“Professor Harley tells me you have been visited by other devils.”

“A single devil.”

“A bald devil.”

Something within Ms. Lalonde’s skirts move alarmingly. Ms. Lalonde kisses her on the mouth and says, “Would you like tea?” 

It is clear as Ms. Lalonde moves that there is something wrong, or at least different. There are no footsteps, no swinging legs. And there is a trail of slime forming behind her, like a slug. Kanaya walks a measured half-step to the left and does her best to keep her skin from creeping off of her body. Ms. Lalonde invites Kanaya a seat the couch and pours her a cup of tea. 

“You must have noticed it by now.”

“Yes. I have noticed you have made a mistake.” 

“Why, Ms. Maryam. I think of it more as a… personal enhancement.” She sits on a couch perpendicular to Kanaya’s. Her lower half settles against the couch and wiggles and squirms. Ms. Lalonde smooths down her skirts, smiles at Kanaya slyly. “Do you like it?” 

“Ms. Lalonde, you know well that I am a devil.” 

“Do I? You have yet to ask for my soul. Are you a clever mechanical replacement?” 

She removes her hat and places it on her lap. Ms. Lalonde’s skirts move most indecently. Kanaya finds herself playing with her gloves again, letting it looser to release some heat. “And you are aware that we devils view your rubbery friends as abominations. And I speak for all devils when I say that it is no surprise you were banished to the Tomb Colonies for so many months, if you have consented to such an operation.” 

Ms. Lalonde’s smile grows smaller. She sips her tea. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, you are right. The Court requests my absence, Hell has grown cooler towards me, and even my Veilgarden friends find excuses to lose my letters. If I am drunk too often, then at least I am drunk alone. And knowing all this, I still thought you would not reject me.” 

A purple tentacle pokes out from under the skirt. She eyes the rubbery … whatever it is, and sighs. “I do not reject you. I only disapprove of your choices. As usual.” 

“There’s nothing saying you can’t enjoy the fruits of my poor decisions, is there?” 

The tentacle slips further out from Ms. Lalonde’s skirt and slips around Kanaya’s ankle. It is soaking her stockings, never mind the strange goop on her shoe, the stain on the hem of her skirt. Kanaya lifts the dress higher, to keep it clear—the tentacle, evidently, sees this as invitation to crawl further up. The appendage is purple, cool to the touch, but throbs against Kanaya’s skin. The tentacle clenches around her calf; her back arches. Her nipples are stiff already. 

Ms. Lalonde is taking her tea from her. The tentacle’s grasp on her leg relaxes, then tightens again. “That’s about as far as I can reach from here,” Ms. Lalonde says. Another tentacle has relieved Kanaya of her shoes, and now runs along the bottom of her foot. “Do you mind if I…” 

“Please,” Kanaya says. Ms. Lalonde raises her skirts with one hand, revealing the black mass below, nothing but tentacle after tentacle. Kanaya has barely a moment to think, There’s not a stitch of clothing, before Ms. Lalonde drops the skirts and presses an open-mouth kiss to her gloved palm. The tentacles creep over her knees, around her thighs. They are forcing her legs apart, breaking her garters, ruining every article of clothing she is wearing. Ms. Lalonde is smiling into her hand. Then she moves away. Rubbery limbs pin down her arms and wrap around her hands, and weigh her down. 

She curves her hand around Ms. Lalonde’s chin and guides her up for a kiss. She receives a mouthful of tongue which, honestly, she should have expected. She bats Ms. Lalonde away. “You kiss like a French king.” 

“And you moan like his favorite whore. Lean back for me.” She does, shifting so her head’s against the armrest. Ms. Lalonde helpfully arranges her legs, tosses aside the drawers and tugs off the stockings. The tentacles slide up, higher; they’re warming to her skin. Her thighs are slick not only low from Ms. Lalonde’s touch, but between her legs, where they have yet to reach. Ms. Lalonde bends down for another kiss, this time at least remembering she still has lips. Ms. Lalonde shifts above her, and the mass of tentacles glide even higher, a few rubbing against her cunt and parting the lips. “You’re always so hot,” she says, panting into Kanaya’s ear. Kanaya slaps her. “Ow!” 

“If you think I will permit you to defile me with your foul implements, then you are mistaken.” 

“I thought devils were hedonists. Sorry. Most devils.” 

“We are not depraved.” 

“Just unholy.” Ms. Lalonde twists one of Kanaya’s nipples. A few tentacles release her calves and move up to her stomach. Some come around her ass. Her skirt’s been flipped around her chest, the layers stuck together from Ms. Lalonde’s slime. “No one is going to notice.”

“Look what you have done to my suit!”

“You can just say the nuns threw holy water at you,” Ms. Lalonde says, and kisses her throat. Wetly, of course. Kanaya tries to move her hand to shove her, but it’s no use: she’s pinned down to the couch, bound by Ms. Lalonde and her cool, constantly moving body. She pushes her face into the couch, digs her nails into the tentacles around her hands. The tentacle drags along her slit. “Ms. Maryam, will you let me?” 

“Ugh, you should have fucked one of the tomb colonists instead of letting your perverse imagination run wild.” 

“Who’s to say I didn’t?” The mass parts from her thighs to make room for Ms. Lalonde’s hands. Ms. Lalonde takes the time to kiss her again before plunging two fingers into her with a snap of her wrist. Her thrusts are quick and deep—Kanaya twists and pants against the mass, but there’s no escape. Her hips grind down, then arch up; there’s warming pressure everywhere. Ms. Lalonde’s thumb pressed against her clit, her mouth biting through her blouse, a third finger buried deep in her cunt. Kanaya’s eyes roll back—she comes on Rose’s hand, straining hard against Ms. Lalonde’s tentacles, then lets herself be taken away from them. Ms. Lalonde comes back up and kisses her cheek. 

Ms. Lalonde lets her human half lay against Kanaya. She can still feel the human heat of Ms. Lalonde’s body, the burning clarity of her soul. Kanaya reaches for Rose’s wrist and thinks, If only I had a sprifing fork. I could lift your soul from you in an instant. Not to take, but to look at it, a little. 

“Are you sure you do not want me to ravish you?” 

“Why should I?” 

“Why not? They feel nice against your skin, don’t they?” Ms. Lalonde licks her fingers clean with a thoughtful expression. Her glove is so wet, the only space still dry is a spot on the back. “Do you hate the Rubbery Men so much?” 

“ _Yes._ They are an abomination, an affront to Heaven and Hell alike, and—”

“I understand your point now, Ms. Maryam. There’s no need to go on.” At Kanaya’s snort, she says, “I wouldn’t use one of these.” She raises a tentacle, one of the larger ones on the outside. Her eyes close. The seemingly endless quantity of tentacles part and reveal a set of smaller ones. Still sizeable, but nowhere as long or thick as the ones Ms. Lalonde used to hold her down. 

“Hmm,” she says noncommittally, but she tugs off her gloves and sets them on the table. She strokes the tentacles a few times, without growing any more affectionate for it, but she appreciates the way it makes Ms. Lalonde sigh and melt against her. Ms. Lalonde is nearly liquid against her, warm and responsive; the tentacles slide over her fingers, runs over them. There are suckers on the underside. “What sort of evil bargain did you make to get these?” 

“I’ll tell you later. Fuck. Kanaya! Ms. Maryam.” She seems to ooze backwards, arms spread against the couch, the many tentacles parting and spilling as Kanaya works the ones around her hand. The boundaries of her body twist, distort; her fingers, gripping the velvet couch, ripple and tremble from Kanaya’s ministrations. 

Still, Kanaya can’t help adding, “A good infernal contract is legally binding, and leaves no trace of deformity.” 

“You never tire of finding ways of unsexing a moment. I’m in awe, really. Tell me more about soullessness. That will surely—oh!—slick me up like wax to a flame.” 

Her gaze sends fire through Kanaya’s nerves, to the very ends of her scalp and toes. She applies herself harder, reaching further to the center of Ms. Lalonde’s mass until her fingertips brush against a ring of soft muscle. Ms. Lalonde undulates, the sea of black fanning out and curling back in. Her breasts heave, in a way Kanaya thought only possible in stories. She strokes the ring, feels it pulse around her hand, jerks the smaller ones in her hands, watches as Ms. Lalonde throws her head back and bites her lip, twists in place and says, “Oh, God, Kanaya,” and swings over Kanaya. Her black mass moving, gripping, clenching. The thing in her hand slips away, and Kanaya feels it press against her inner thigh, slide higher. Kanaya nods into Ms. Lalonde’s shoulder. 

It’s cold, slow to warm, and wider than she anticipated. Ms. Lalonde’s other appendages pull Kanaya closer, and spreads her legs further open. She feels Ms. Lalonde’s torso pull up, and feels the rubbery tentacle slide further, smooth and frictionless. Then Ms. Lalonde gasps and kisses her neck and holds onto her. 

“You’re bad at this,” Kanaya says. She bears down on the tentacle, clenches around it. Yes. She can feel the suckers. Ms. Lalonde shivers. 

“When they make an illustrated manual for octopus fucking, I’ll be sure to consult it.” She lifts herself and lets the tentacle fall out an inch or two. This time she twists the tentacle as it goes in and pushes up. It’s a good feeling, heavy yet liquid. “Lie back,” Ms. Lalonde says, “and think of England.”

“Why?” Kanaya says, but Ms. Lalonde’s eyes are unfocused, her lids fluttering. She bends down and kisses Kanaya, still like a French king. But perhaps one of the better ones.

*** 

“I will need an umbrella,” Kanaya says. Some hours have gone by, long enough that it has started to rain and fog taller than the windows obscure the outside. She is in the process of relocating her clothing, though she suspects everything is irreparable. Even her bustle is bent out of shape, and no amount of tugging has managed to restore it to its original inconvenient glory.

“Why? Do devils steam if water hits them?” 

“I have bathed here too often for you to ask such questions.”

“Humor me,” Ms. Lalonde says. She has not changed out of her dress or even allowed Kanaya to loosen the back. Occasionally when Kanaya bends over, one of the tentacles will stroke her leg or bottom. It is all very juvenile. Kanaya’s ears may be in a permanent state of redness. 

“No, we do not.”

“Haha! I know.” She waits until Kanaya has fetched her gloves from behind a bookshelf. “Come here so I can help you back in.” 

Kanaya does. It’s a process that goes, by her own judgment, pleasantly slowly. It is far easier to be dressed than to dress yourself. “If you will humor some questions for me,” she says, “then I would like to know about the bald devil that visited you. Was he Dr. Scratch?”

“Yes! You know him? You must. You all work for the Embassy, after all.” Ms. Lalonde pulls the chemise over her. She begins to work on the layers of skirts. “I did nothing with him. Don’t worry.” 

“It is not jealousy that moves me to ask this,” she says. “But concern for your soul. I like you better with it, Rose.”

“Don’t call me that. I’ve not forgotten that you’re a devil, Ms. Maryam. As lovely as you are, you devils all want the same thing, and all are incapable of the same thing. Hold your arms up so I can get you into your blouse.” 

She holds her arms out and lets Ms. Lalonde dress her back into her own clothes. Blouse, then jacket. “We are not incapable of love, if that is what you are saying.”

“Incapable of unconditional love. Or at least a love uncompromised.” 

“There’s no such thing.” 

“I’m a romantic.”

“You are young.” Then again, so is Kanaya. It was only two centuries ago that Scratch brought her from Syria to Hell, and a mere ten years since she has been in London. Ms. Lalonde has fewer years, but a greater sense of bearings. She never tires of finding new ways to push Kanaya, or knocking her off balance. 

“When I used your name, it was in the heat of the moment. Not that it will matter much,” Ms. Lalonde says. “I’ve sold my soul to Dr. Scratch, you see. I wanted to know the lives of the Rubbery Men better, and he knew some magic that would give me these. At the cost of my soul, once the magic wore off, since like many devils, the sight of this many legs alarms him. It sounded like a good deal to me. So I consented.” Kanaya’s nearly all dressed again, save for her gloves and shoes. She turns, furious. Even barefoot Kanaya has a considerable advantage over Ms. Lalonde, and it spooks Ms. Lalonde enough that she steps to the side and turns her face away. “Personally, I blame my mother. Frigidity does no babe good.” 

“You sold your soul for _that_?” she says. “Of all things. Why not something worthwhile? Why did you not ask me before you signed a deal with Scratch? Scratch wishes no one good.” 

“We weren’t talking then. I believe because of how you thought I was ‘ruining my own life.’”

“Which you then proceeded to do! Did you do it out of spite? Puerile self-sabotage? Or—does Dr. Lalonde know? Or your brother?” 

“No,” she says. She has blobbishly moved away, and is putting her hair up again using her reflection in the window. 

“You are calmer than I expected.” 

“Oh, as though you aren’t thrilled,” she says. 

“Even we devils feel pity for the unhappily desouled. How much time do you have left?” 

“Two weeks. I doubt you’ll even know the difference. It could even be an upgrade!” But her reflection in the mirror looks ashen and concerned. Her hands shake as she slides the pins into Kanaya’s hair. She doesn’t shake Kanaya off when she puts a hand on her shoulder. “I have been wondering,” she says, “what a soul is. Besides a tiny person in a jar—I know that much. But I’ve never understood what it does.” 

“It’s very important,” Kanaya says. Ms. Lalonde looks at her, expectant. She feels suddenly caged. “Ms. Lalonde,” she says. “I know you do not think much of me or my skills, and distrust my intent. But if you will let me, I will do my best to make void the contract Scratch has made with you.” 

Ms. Lalonde says nothing at first. She puts her hand on Kanaya’s and asks, very seriously, “Is it true that all devils are lawyers?” 

“Oh. No. That is going to be a problem, I think.” 

*** 

Safe in the halls of the Brass Embassy again, among the bright-burning chandeliers and her fellow keen-eyed devils. She stops by her apartment in the Neath first, on one of the lower floors of a Hell-owned towers, to dress into an evening gown, and to burn her ruined clothes, then heads to the Embassy with the urchin’s soul in her bag. “Oh, another one of these?” says the desk deviless on duty, holding the jar and making a face. 

“It belonged to an urchin. Where is Dr. Scratch? I need to speak with him.”

“He in his office. I’ll tell him his favorite protégé has arrived.” 

“Please,” Kanaya says. She’s realizing her mistake in not bringing a cake. “I should like it if you were to tell him it’s Ms. Maryam.” 

The desk deviless gets up and vanishes down the hall. A few minutes later she returns and beckons Kanaya to come with her. 

There is a burning lamp every eight feet on either side of the green hall. It’s warm even for devils. By the time she gets to the end of the hall, she has to take a moment to dab at her forehead with a handkerchief before entering Scratch’s office. Not his office, precisely, but the antechamber leading to his office. There is sign on the door leading to the office: THE DOCTOR IS [IN] THE DOCTOR WILL [NOT] SEE YOU. 

There are two yellow fires on the west and east sides of the room, twelve clocks with moonpearls on its hands along the walls, and a single window. In the center of the room, facing the closed office door, is a table with a typewriter. She adjusts her cap, sits at the stool, and cracks her knuckles. 

Dr Scratch I Have Just Returned From Light Street Where Ms Lalonde Presently Resides After Her Return From The Tomb Colonies As I Am Sure You Are Aware   
I Have Seen Her Deformity And Know Of The Nature By Which She Received It And Would Like To Make An Inquiry As To The Wording Of The Contract You Made With Her As Well As The Terms And Conditions   
You Have Done Me Many Favors In The Past And I Am Ever Grateful To You And Would Be Again Indebted To You If You Would Do Me This One   
Kanaya Maryam 

The reply arrives before she can even consider spritzing the letter with perfume. The typewriter comes to life, spits out several lines of text, and spits the paper out. There are candles on the fireplace. She lights one using the fireplace, and runs the letter over the flame. 

My dearest Kanaya,—How wonderful it is to hear from you again. We really must meet again soon for lunch, but I am afraid it may be some decades before my schedule will open up. I am too busy bending the populace of Fallen London to my will. All part of our greater mission to make way for their ultimate masters, and my personal mission to be an excellent host.  
As for the young woman on Light Street, I am afraid the terms and conditions of her contract are largely forgotten to me. I am ever so busy. You can be assured that it is the standard Abstraction document: you give me your soul, I keep it in a shiny jar safe from harm, you come to some various good fortune and brass, I watch your tiny miniature weep in the bottle and bemoan its distance from God.  
Yes, God.  
I find it helpful to invoke Him in every correspondence to humans. I know what a kick they get out of it.  
If you would like more information, you will want to contact my lawyer at Fowlingpiece and Baseborn, but I doubt you will find anything of value there. Nothing you don’t already know. Hee hee.  
Doc Scratch

“This is very stupid,” she says, irked. “I know you are in the next room.” 

“Hee hee,” says someone right by her ear. But when she looks over her shoulder, there is no one there. 

She sits at the typewriter once more. 

Dr Scratch It Is Generally Known That The Lalondes Are My Mark   
I Am Distraught By The Present State Of Ms Lalonde And Also Offended That You Have Intruded On My Territory And Would Like To Request That Your Contract Be Nullified So That I May Extract Ms Lalondes Soul More Immediately   
I Am Not Going To Write A Valediction Because This System Of Communication Wastes Paper And Time And Candles

Ms. Maryam,—What contract do you have with the devils of this Embassy that marks Light Street as your own territory? We are not animals. Just because you have laid a claim on Ms. Lalonde’s body does not mean you have her soul. I’ve only done you the liberty of completing your work.   
As for the favors you claim you owe me, you are correct. But their price is too high for me to charge you. Think of this as a last act of charity from your old mentor.   
I have here enclosed a suitable valediction.   
Doc Scratch

***

There are many lawyers working at the Brass Embassy, but the lawyer she is searching for specifically is the Blind Barrister. When Kanaya appears at the Blind Barrister’s desk, she says, “Not now, Ms. Maryam. If you’ve come for me for another divorce, then go away and find a solicitor!” 

“I’ve never come to you for a divorce. It is urgent.”

“Bluh.” The Blind Barrister puts a hand on her cheek. She looks bored and discontent, as though the Capricious Minion has been troubling her again. The floor around her desk has been stabbed repeatedly by some slim blade. The Barrister has also spilled coffee through the cracks; the sawdust is still there, preserving the Barrister’s tidally poor mood. “Okay, Ms. Maryam. What is it?” 

“I need you to consult me on a contract.” 

“Do you have the contract?” Kanaya shakes her head. “Name, soul quality, and requisition number.” 

“Ms. Rose Lalonde, unknown, and not yet applicable.”

“Then it’s no good! The initial contracts are done at the human firms, then transferred here for the keeping. If the contract hasn’t been delivered here, then I can’t do anything.” 

“You must know someone in the human offices.” 

“Nope.”

“But surely,” Kanaya says, growing irate, “you must know at least one. Ouch!” She’s been hit by the Barrister’s cane. 

“I’m in infernal affairs! I don’t know anyone who can help you. Besides, Mr. Strider left his law firm to become a revolutionary.” A pause. The Barrister dips her fountain pen into the inkwell. “Ms. Rose Lalonde, sister to Dave Strider and Mr. Dirk Strider’s ward?” Kanaya nods and rubs her hip. “I am on good terms with their human family lawyer. I can contact him—if you’re willing to make an exchange.” 

If there is one thing lawyers know how to do, it is blackmail and leverage. It is not as though she enjoyed smuggling Vriska out of Hell, or out of London; and Terezi did not have to come all the way here, or stay here to await Vriska’s return. Terezi should have stayed in Hell, or roaming on the Surface, consigning the unfortunate to her fire-red judgment.

As though sensing Kanaya’s scowl, the Barrister sighs wearily. “Kanaya,” she says. “Have I ever been angry at you for sneaking Vriska to the Neath? You owe me.” 

You owe me, Vriska said. Or, as her typewritten missive had put it: Y8U OWE M8 M8RY8M!!!!!!!! The keys of her vowels were stuck frequently stuck, as was the one for embiggening. She owes Vriska nothing now; and that is what makes it easy for her to ask, “What do you want?” 

“I need you to go into the third coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers and deliver a message to Ms. Lejion. It’d help if you pretend to be a nun.” She takes an envelope from her desk and sticks it down the front of Kanaya’s gown. Kanaya squawks in indignation and slaps the Barrister. This draws some stares, but mostly for how loudly the Barrister laughs. 

“That’s it?” Kanaya says. “I would have thought you’d ask me for help on other matters.” 

“What, you don’t believe me? I work on other cases! But this time it is nothing but me propositioning Ms. Lejion for her sweet booty.” When Kanaya slips a claw under the letter flap, the Barrister’s hand finds hers. She smiles. “It wasn’t an invitation, Maryam. I will send a telegram to their family lawyer in the morning when he has woken up. You are still living on Prospect and Usury? I will pay a visit to your home when I have information for you.” She reaches for Kanaya’s hand. They shake on it, sealing their contract. Palm to palm, the Barrister seems to grow sweet to Kanaya’s eyes. She finds herself smiling. 

“It is good to have your friendship again,” Kanaya says. 

“Kanaya.” The Barrister regards her with a kind, concerned expression, her face worried like a peach pit. “This is a contract, you know.” 

“Oh, yes,” she says. “I have not forgotten.” 

Later she hails a hansom. There is a society party awaiting her, whole gaggles of loosely souled women and men waiting for their contracts to be signed and sealed, and also, food. There is none left in her apartment. 

She strokes her palm in time to the clap of iron shoes and the rattling of the wheels. She is thinking of Vriska again, and Karkat, and Gamzee, Aradia, Sollux, Nepeta. There used to be the twelve of them, good and happy friends, born on the Surface in the late seventeenth century. By chance they found each other in a dingy city in Prussia. There was a war and they had come to prey, some of them in pairs or trios, and others, like Kanaya, alone. In the morning, under the hateful sun, they would perform their duties. But the night before, they took a room for themselves and talked about themselves: where they were from, how they learned their talents, how they came here and by what way. 

The twelve of them parted ways after that night, and made their large gatherings only occasionally. Eventually they went down into Hell. Only a few of them have come to the Neath. Already a quarter of them are dead: Tavros, Aradia, Sollux. Vriska—well. She is merely missing. 

It has been—a century, a century and a decade since that youthful night. Terezi waited until past midnight to tell her story; it was late and by then Kanaya was drowsy and drunk, and knew a rough outline of her since Terezi knew many of the others already. The good Barrister had been born in Persia, among the mangrove trees. She lived like a demon monkey, luring humans so she could hang them in a cage of roots and water for their sins or for their goodness. It was not souls she was interested in, but their torment and their despair. 

Why is she remembering this now? Perhaps because that night was not a contract. No promises of favors for favors, no exchange of secrets for clues, pennies for flame. You see, Ms. Lalonde, even devils have romantic youths. Apart from the bodies, hung up in the living cages, the young men and women in the Prussian mud, their blinking eyes watering from the cold and sleet inside their veins. Well. Minor blemishes in the grand scheme of things. Not all of it can be perfect.

***

 

The next day she wakes early and goes to the Labyrinth of Tigers. This once sounded to her like an amusing game you play with children where you get to plant the seeds of nightmares that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, but she now knows it is a zoo kept by tigers, and holds both creatures and humans. In the deepest coils of the labyrinth the Church carries out breeding experiments of the zootheological sort; no one is allowed but the few hunters and select clergy and the Bishop himself. For this reason it is helpful to have a cat wrangler such as Ms. Lejion, who can part felines from their secrets with ease, and convince tigers to let her cling to their bellies as they make their usual patrol rounds. 

Far more reliable than pretending to be a nun. Kanaya was raised by them, but it has been two centuries since they cast her out in fear. She does not even remember how to make the cross, though she can get through half of a Hail Mary without rolling her eyes. 

Still, she makes it down through the public entrance, and down to the first coil without incident. To get to the second and third coils, she asks a tiger to escort her in exchange for secrets. 

“It’s only the fourth coil where the hunters beat devils out,” the tiger tells her. 

“What, really?” she says, half-tempted to throw her wimple onto the floor. 

“Keep it,” the tiger tells her. “It will keep the captured nuns and urchins from pissing on you when we pass their cages.” 

Part way through the third coil, she hears a hissing: “Kanaaaaaaaaya.” 

Kanaya turns her head to the left. There is Vriska behind the bars. She seems different somehow, not as bright, not as frightening, and this has robbed her of her beauty. Kanaya lets the tiger stride ahead so she can stare. 

“Kanaya,” Vriska says, clutching the bars. A goatskin is wrapped around her shoulders like a grotesque scarf or cape. It has been half-assedly tanned, and stinks of innards and poorly cooked offal. “Kanaya, where the fuck have you even _been_ —fuck!” She seems to be in pain. There are all kinds of strange protrusions on Vriska’s face: bones piercing through, peels of flesh spilling out from her coat sleeves, a forehead pitted with round holes. 

“Vriska,” Kanaya says, frightened. “What has happened to you?” 

“I got my eyes back,” she says, and the holes suddenly glint with sight. They fix Kanaya with an awful stare, bloody and too bright. “I got them back no thanks to _you_ , you shit! Fuck fuck fuck, it hurts—it hurts, Kanaya, it _hurts_ , I can’t believe you left me to die! Again. Whatever! Bitch.” She grabs Kanaya by the collar and pulls her close. She kisses Kanaya, spits into her mouth, and fades into the pools of shadow behind the bars. When Kanaya presses her body against the iron, she sees nothing: no person, no eyes, no one. She feels the inside of her mouth and spits. 

***

Ms. Lejion greets her with a strangling hug, the kind interrogators must use on their victims. “Kanaya, Kanaya, Kanaya, it’s been furever!” Ms. Lejion takes the letter from her, and kisses Kanaya on the cheek, then on the mouth. 

“Yes, a year at least,” she says, making sure to kiss Ms. Lejion as well, though more to the side of the mouth rather than the lips; the memory of the phantom Vriska’s kiss has not made the idea of lip-to-lip contact palatable, even if it is friendly. Ms. Lejion smells the way that cats do, only with more dried blood and gore stuck to her clothes. “You look well.” 

“Yeah,” she says, and flexes her arm. “I’ve been busy. You smell nice, too! All kinds of purrfume.” 

“Yes, thank you.” Ugh. It will never come out. 

Ms. Lejion opens the letter. The tail-like contraption protruding from her coat sways. Then she tucks the letter into her coat and says, “You can tell Ms. Pyrope I’ll send a cat to her later.” 

Cats. Like most devils, Kanaya has a good relationship with them, the gray ones and the tabbies and the black ones, too, but she can’t imagine what services she would have to render to make a cat a letter carrier. Still, cats know things, and so does Ms. Lejion. She says, casually as possible, “What is the Spider Captain doing here?” 

“Meow?” 

Kanaya leads her to the cage from where Vriska called her name. There’s no one in there, not a scrap of silk or the rank scent of fear. For a moment she is shaken, until Nepeta cries, “Oh, the hyenas must be loose again!”

There are hyenas that know how to lick mind honey and transport themselves into dreams. The clever and experienced of them know how to bend on the minds of the visitors: a pound of weight on a very long lever wedged into a small crack. The things that come flying up from the weight are small and black, and skitter like spiders. 

After she returns to her apartment, she ends up kneeling by her bed with her heart at full gallop in her chest. It feels like she is too alive, too much with the living, too much. She is seeing Ms. Lalonde in the cage, coming apart at the waist, one half devouring the other. 

*** 

“No,” Ms. Lalonde says. “I’ve been fine. I’ve become inured to hysteria. It isn’t what the physicians like to hear, but it’s true.” 

They are drinking in the library. Ms. Lalonde is surrounded by old texts: texts from the Third City, texts from the Fourth City, even some devilish texts on the nature of souls. 

“It does not seem like your character to become ‘inured to hysteria,’” Kanaya says. She has made sure to tuck her legs and skirts away from the probing touch of Ms. Lalonde’s tentacles; she is wearing a nice skirt today, and does not want to see them ruined. And she is not in the mood, besides. 

“How would you put it?” 

“Escapism by way of mind honey or wine.”

“That seems judgmental.” 

“But also true,” she says, nodding to the wine-rimmed teacups pointedly. 

“I’m under a lot of stress,” she says, and brings a cup to her mouth. The small hairs above her lip are purple from dried wine, and focusing on this is helpful for the way it reminds her that this situation is caused by an error in choice. The good thing about this is that choice can be undone by choice. The bad thing is this has given the Strider-Lalondes an uncanny aura of vigorously crumbling immortality, as though bad fortune has taken it upon itself to test them constantly. “Besides, you are the one seeing things. I daresay you are the one who is becoming hysterical. Shall I call for a nurse for some salts?” 

When Dr. Lalonde is home, she throws salt at Kanaya when Kanaya leaves the house. 

“I should go,” Kanaya says. She doesn’t know when the Blind Barrister will call for her, but it is soon nearing the end of the workday. She imagines it will be soon. “You are not doing anything foolish again?” 

A few tentacles crawl from under Ms. Lalonde’s skirts and wave in the air. They seem to be flipping her the bird. “I appreciate the effort you are making,” Ms. Lalonde says. “I’m sure you’re making fine progress.” 

“It is more progress than you are making.” 

“I’m doing some soul searching.”

“Yes, such wit,” Kanaya says. She rises. 

Ms. Lalonde does as well. For a moment she looks fond. Then she looks down at a book and her gaze flickers like a candle flame bent by the wind; her mind has caught onto something. “I’ve been wondering, Ms. Maryam, whether devils are born soulless or if they are taken at some young age.” 

“What? Of course we are born soulless.” The question is so blindingly stupid that for a moment Kanaya can only open her mouth, then close it again. “I was born on the Surface many years ago,” she says. “There were no devils around me, yet the nuns I was living with confirmed me to be without a soul at my birth.”

“Nuns?” 

“Yes. I was born in a nunnery. A sister there happened to receive a traveling devil in the night. It seems as though he had been reading Boccaccio.”

“Ah, a grand tradition of readers,” Ms. Lalonde says, and snickers. “You’re half-human, then? I didn’t know that.” 

“No. I am a devil.”

“I’m sorry, I find myself unable to make the distinction. What makes a devil a devil? Besides your fetching eyes and the warmth of your touch.”

“You should ask your Church and see what they think.”

“Maybe I will,” Ms. Lalonde says. She kisses Kanaya on the cheek, then once on the mouth, until Kanaya’s backed against a wall. Suddenly her nose wrinkles. “What is that smell? It’s like you’ve been diving for souls at the bottom of the Thames.” 

*** 

The Blind Barrister comes that evening, with a summary of the infernal contract Scratch and Ms. Lalonde drew up. Standard, as far as these kinds of contracts go. The only exception is the delay, a six month delay between the signing and the taking, to take into account Ms. Lalonde’s stay in the tomb colonies, and as always, an exclusivity agreement. 

At this, the Blind Barrister scowls and says, “Ms. Maryam, you didn’t tell me this contract was drawn by Dr. Scratch.” 

“It didn’t seem a big deal.” 

“Ha!” The Blind Barrister shakes her head. “I was prepared to help you! To offer you my legal counsel in this matter. But you can see now that I can do nothing more to help you. I am through with Scratch, just as he is through with me. And if you weren’t such a boneheaded dunderhead, you would let this Ms. Lalonde matter well alone. You dummy.” 

The Barrister stares at Kanaya, dispassionate and also unimpressed. It has been many years since they were friends, and the Barrister treats Kanaya as such. 

“I didn’t mean to trick you,” Kanaya says. 

“You never mean to, Kanaya, but it always happens! I have accepted it as your nature. You do harm that you do not intend to. Whatever. It is water under the bridge.” Still, her red, blind eyes seem to be glazed with a sympathetic sheen. “We could get dinner sometime.” 

“Yes,” she says. “After this is done.” She gives the Barrister a smile, before realizing she will not see it. “Are you familiar with church law, Terezi?” 

“Fairly! Though you should be more familiar with it than me, Ms. Nun.” 

“Ugh, it is just prayer there,” Kanaya says. “Prayer and fasting and reading that musky book and listening to some old crone talk about marrying their Lord Stigmata. You are more familiar with their policy. What is it that they say about us Surface-born devils?” 

“A good deal more than they should. A child born of devil and man will always be a devil. Sin is sin. I can cite some scholars for you.” 

“It is only that a friend asked me whether devils could be born with souls.” 

“Ha!” says the Barrister. “Don’t listen to them, Kanaya. They will fill your head with nonsense and you’ll start seeing things at weird angles. Are you thinking of something? Tell me! We’ve known each other for too long to hide things.”

“You may be right,” she says, but she is thinking, You are repeating that too much for you to mean it. She looks down at her hands. She says, “I thought I saw Vriska in the Labyrinth. But I was distracted, and the screaming makes you think.” 

“Yes,” the Barrister says after a moment. “It will do that.”

After that they talk about dinner plans: where to eat, what they will eat, whether they will have time this week or that week. And then the Barrister leaves, leaving Kanaya in her apartments, alone. 

What to do, what to do. There may be nothing to do. She is no lawyer; she cannot take Dr. Scratch by defeating his contracts. She could have Ms. Lalonde thrown in prison, or killed or exiled or lost to madness, but Scratch will come for her eventually. Perhaps Ms. Lalonde will be improved by being soulless, but it would not be incorrect to say that devils are drawn to souls the way a mosquito is drawn to warm-blooded creatures and shallow, still bodies of water. 

She is thinking this the wrong way. Even Dr. Scratch has wants and needs. She thinks to the Barrister, then to the Spider Captain hiding in the Labyrinth. Is that it, is that the only thing she can hope to use? She touches her forehead with her fingertips, then recoils from herself—was that a spur of bone protruding from her forehead? 

No. It is only a hairpin, loosening and falling past her hairline. She plucks the pin from her hair and slowly lets her hair down. It is getting long again, and soon she must have it cut. 

*** 

In the early morning she goes to the banks of the Thames to meet with her most reliable spirifer contact, her pockets heavy with brass. She makes the trade, though she can tell soon sprifing is boring him. Stealing souls is not high work. It is far better to sell souls or to barter with them as currency rather than being the one wading through the muddy waters or hanging from the hospital ceiling. 

She goes to the Brass Embassy with her haul. 

“Excellent,” says the Dashing Devil manning the desk. He is about to hand her reward, but she says, “I will need my payment in rostygold.” 

“Do you have the forms?” 

“Really?” 

“I’m a bureaucrat, not a wish dispenser.” 

“You are an ass,” she says venomously, but spends the next two hours filling out the appropriate requisition and requests for approval forms anyway. Three hours after that, her request is granted and she is on her way to the Labyrinth of Tigers again, pockets heavy with rostygold. The weight is cold but at least smells of familiar, friendly things: blood, violence, and cash. 

In the Labyrinth of Tigers, the tigers and cats like secrets best of all, but the Keeper is mindful of the physical costs of paying for food and labor, and he will exchange his secrets for other goods: jade, rostygold, amber. She calls on Ms. Lejion again and asks for an introduction to the Keeper. Ms. Lejion is willing, but like all devilish interactions there is a trading of favors. An introduction for a thousand rats on a string and good gossip on the recent inventions Mr. Zahhak has been working on. And even then, Ms. Lejion is sure to warn her, there is no guarantee that the Keeper will tell her what she wants. 

“Are you planning to eat the rats?” Kanaya says. She is hoping—praying—the rats are for tiger bribery or traps. 

“Yeah,” Ms. Lejion says. 

“Ah,” Kanaya says. “I did suspect as much.” 

It’s almost the end of the day by the time the Keeper sees her. He admits her into his office, has her sit. He himself sprawls out on top of a desk too small for him: he has to tuck his hindquarters tight to keep them from falling off the edge, and his front paws curl into the wood, claws extended, to keep his tiger body from falling over. 

The air is thick with incense, but a meaty one. High above, hams are curing on the ceiling. He nods when Kanaya tells him about the Spider Captain: yes, yes. 

“A most unique case,” says the Keeper. “She was found raving and shipwrecked on an island not far from the City with a half-eaten Overgoat. When they brought her back to the city, she lunged for the cats. The Duchess had her thrown in. It doesn’t matter to the Duchess whether it’s a devil or an aristocrat. But the Captain escaped.” 

How, is the obvious question. It makes the Keeper yawn and say something along the lines of, Oh, you know. Flash bomb. Something like that. 

“Where can I find her?” Kanaya says. 

The look the Keeper gives her says, What do you think. Kanaya grunts. She has no idea. She should have known better than to ask questions from a tiger, or any feline. They are very elegant but also very rude and obtuse. 

She is about to ask the Keeper to stop batting around, please, when the Keeper says, “You are not the only one to come asking about the Spider Captain. The bald devil has come here, too. And the Whispering Huntress has come asking, independent of the Embassy.” 

“Scratch?” Kanaya says. Then, “Why independently?” 

It comes to her like a catapulted rock: the Barrister. The Barrister made the inquiries. Is Ms. Lejion now sniffing about, searching for Vriska’s trail? Has Ms. Lejion told the Barrister that Kanaya had seen the Captain—has the Barrister sent Kanaya here, knowing what she would see? Yes, yes, to all of it. That is Terezi Pyrope, a thinker for sure, but an executor to the very last. Action is in her being. Fuck all. She cannot believe the Barrister is still holding onto this stupid grudge. She cannot believe Vriska has found a way to interfere with her life, even now. 

“Tea?” the Tiger Keeper says. 

*** 

She buys a number of rats from the Keeper and goes to meet Ms. Lejion again. Her mouth is dry and this is making her breath smell bad; even so, she is sure to greet Ms. Lejion with a smile. 

“I must leave now,” she says. “But thank you for being such a charming guide.”

“What were you doing here, anyway?” Ms. Lejion says, then bites into a rat. 

“The Barrister will know,” Kanaya says. “Will you be busy for the rest of the day?” 

“Ohh, yes. Very busy.” She gives a little purr. Kanaya thinks, _Kill!_ But there’s no danger this time. She is jittery. Oh, I am ever your friend, all is behind me! And Kanaya is the Traitor Empress’ favorite black dress! So the Barrister’s plan was to entrap Kanaya in a favor, then pummel her into the ground until she coughs up what she knows. She does not want to deal with Vriska now or ever again for that matter, but if it means preserving Rose’s soul, she will suffer it. 

“Ms. Lejion, do you know if Vriskers—Vriska has ever been kept here?” 

“Meow? As a visitor?” 

“No. As an exhibit. I swear I have seen her here.” 

“Noooo,” Ms. Lejion says, but she looks away from Kanaya to hide her deceit. 

Kanaya says, pressing the back of her hand against her forehead and leaning against the wall, “But Terezi has been insinuating it, that she has captured her—and Vriska and I, we were once to be married, much as you and Mr. Zahhak are now betrothed. It torments me to think of her injured or ill.” 

“Ms. Maryam!” Ms. Lejion says. Her cheeks are pinking. “You left Vriskers! Left her to die!”

“I am having regrets,” she says with a sigh. “I miss her, hard as that is for me to believe. We are soulmates.” 

“Did one of the hams fall on your head?” 

“I miss her pawfully.” The tremor in her lip, she hopes, looks more from sadness than laughter. 

Ms. Lejion puffs her cheeks, squeezes her eyes shut, and goes, Ooooooh! “I purromised Terezi I wouldn’t tell you anything, but…” Her voice drops. She leans in. “Yes, she was here. But not fur long, there was this weird light and she vanished. But I’ve been keeping her old exhibit just as it was. I can take you there.”

Yes, take her there. The exhibit evidently was not up long enough for the tigers to have made a sign. Instead there is a dingy cage pushed up against a dead-end, the wall a mere few inches from the bars. Previous prisoners have carved messages in the stone wall with the bones of their dinner or their fingers. There is no sign of Vriska’s malformed scrawl anywhere. 

“Was she in pain?” Kanaya says. She steps into the cage itself. Ms. Lejion follows her. She wants to sound detached or disinterested, but she wants Vriska to be in pain without her. It satisfies her, in a cruel and bloody way. To those who think her spiteful, they have never lived with Vriska or dealt with her or did her favors, day after day, hour after hour. Of all the devils, Vriska is not the meanest, nor the cruelest, nor the sourest. She is not even the prettiest. Vriska is like a gun made animate: it only knows how to shoot, but not how to aim. She fires and is happy. What! she says, standing in the rubble. You mad? 

She spots something glittering on the floor. Broken, like the glass and silver of a mirror, but in the dim cage, it glows with something Kanaya hasn’t seen in years: sunlight. She admires it for a moment for its beauty, for the yearning, like a compass needle for north, of light. Then she hears a sudden goat bleat, sees a wooly beast prancing across the roofs of the Flit—she drops the shard, and it cuts her hand as it falls. In the middle of her swearing, Ms. Lejion comes behind her. 

“A Memory of Light!” Ms. Lejion says. “She must have stepped through one and into the Mewrror Marshes.”

“The what?” 

“It’s where you go if your nightmares get too bad! I think. Equius tells me so. I bet Terezi knows where to get one. She has tons of nightmares. Unless they don’t work on her, because she’s blind.” 

The bleeding has yet to stop. “You mustn’t tell the Blind Barrister you have let me here,” she says around her palm. She is licking the blood absently. 

“I mustn’t let Terezi know you’re here,” Ms. Lejion says, though she looks close to bursting already. Kanaya thinks again: kill! But death doesn’t work so neatly in the Neath. Kill Ms. Lejion and she will wake two days later looking for Kanaya’s head. 

They leave the Labyrinth. At the exit, Kanaya kisses Ms. Lejion sweetly. “I am very thankful to you,” she says, and means to leave after the ritual exchange of pleasantries. 

But Ms. Lejion surprises her. She puts a strong hand on Kanaya’s shoulder to keep her still, then giggles. “I love seeing two people in love,” she says. “But be careful, because this means now I’m going to hunt you, too.” 

*** 

Where is it that you go in Fallen London if you do not want to be found? 

Ten years ago, Kanaya arrived in Fallen London with a dying Vriska on her back: arm blasted away, blind in one eye, salt warping the hems of both of their clothes. She hissed and spat her way into a hotel room, beating off the Londoners who thought they might be able to rob a pair of devils, and tossed Vriska onto the bed. 

“This is the last thing I will do for you,” she had said to Vriska. 

“Fine!” Vriska said. Her knee buckled as she stood, and the lurch of Vriska’s body resembled the surprise of a sailor in a storm. She held onto a wall, wobbled her way to the door, and held it open. “Fine, if that’s how you want to be, then go! But you’ll be sorry I left you. You’re going to wish you were on that ship with me!” 

The ship, because she meant to go to the Zee. On the Surface, Vriska had been a sailor, and in Hell she had thrown passionate stares at waiting vessels in the docks. At last, in the Neath, she found a way to become what she always wanted to be. 

“You know that I have saved your life?” Kanaya said incredulously. “You know that I only came here so when you died, your consciousness would stay tethered to your body instead of being extinguished, that I have trapped myself here for you?” She did not say that at all, because she had punched Vriska in the nose and stormed away, then tripped on the curb and rendered herself unconscious for some two minutes and woke up disoriented and newly robbed. 

The next time Kanaya saw Vriska, it was at a gambling parlor two years after, where Kanaya was out drinking with loud university students, and lifting the souls from some of the local barflies while she was at it. She looked up from a pirate with only one breast—asymmetry is a kind of fashion among zailors and thieves—and found herself caught in Vriska’s gaze. They were on opposite sides of the den, Vriska’s fine wool clothes fastened down by bone buttons and golden thread, Kanaya’s elbows stuck to the spilt beer drying on the tables. Seeing this, Vriska smiled, and her smile gleamed like pearls beneath a soft light.

All this time she assumed Vriska has been doing well for herself. But Vriska looks to be in a real mess now, and it feels less good than she expected it to. Look at her now, a respected Horticulturalist in both Hell and the University—harried and tired now, but excepting the last few days, she has come a long way from getting worms from the sausages of Prussia or kneeling in front of wooden crosses in Syria, or rolling her eyes in London gambling dens as a pirate jabs at her inexpertly with her fingers. 

Where is the place where the deformed and the destitute go? In Fallen London they are everywhere, like puddles of muddy water or a sorrow-spider. But they say a Memory of Light can show the light of the future as well as the past, or at least shine a light onto the right way to go. Where was the mirror goat? In Spite. In the Flit. 

*** 

Mr. Strider the younger is in Spite, though at first Kanaya mistook him for his elder brother. They are nearly identical from behind, though Mr. Strider has more American touches: the make of his fabric, the half-decade outmoded color, the way he looks as though if he were asked to dance he would prefer to die. She sees him while she is trying to climb up a pipe. Immediately she stops her embarrassing scramble up, goes down, and taps him on the shoulder. 

“Hey,” he says. “Didn’t think gals like you hung around places like these.”

“Sometimes there are literal hangings.” 

“Dude.” He looks pained.

They edge closer to a wall, to avoid the urchins. He’s carrying a walking stick, but chances are he’s hiding a sword inside. Like a devil, he wears shades to hide his eyes; unlike a devil, his eyes are a plain, bloody red, without heat. Something makes the inside of his jacket bulge, and he is disguising it poorly by folding his arms and pressing his elbow close to his body. He does not look like her enemy, but then again, neither did Ms. Lejion. 

“Why are you here?” she says. “Has the Blind Barrister sent for you?”

“What? Shit, no. She’s always sending me creepy letters. I can’t even burn them, she coats them with sulfur or something. Didn’t know you even knew her.” 

“We all know each other.” 

“I got that now. Whole society of devils conspiring to take over our city and stuff. So, you here for Rose, too?” 

Ms. Lalonde likely is sending the Mr. Striders to make any last preparations or errands for her, since she cannot exit the house. She looks up at the roof. No goats, no spiders. Nothing, she notes, that might attract others, either. “She has sent you for something, then?” He opens up his jacket and shows her what he’s keeping there: a bottle of sloshing liquid. “Wine?” 

“No, it’s a potion or something. It’s some nasty stuff, Jade told me to not smell it straight on, she told me to wave my hand over the top so I wouldn’t die, but I guess you devils are hardier. I could, uh, waft some for you, if you want.”

The liquid inside beads on the walls, moves with the heaviness of mercury, but blacker. She has no idea what it is. It doesn’t seem to be a poison, though she knows there was a scandal some months ago. Some society men drank mercury for their constipation, and the mercury fell straight through their looping bowels and killed them. They came back, of course. There was nothing a brisk edema couldn’t fix. Victorian medicine never ceases to amaze her. 

She shakes her head. Mr. Strider tucks the bottle back into his jacket with relief. “How is your brother?” 

“Mad. Guess I would be, too, if I found out… You know. I mean, he tells me he’s almost lost his soul a few times but there’s all that, stuff, going on, uh, where, you know…” His skin’s so dark at the ears that it looks like it might flame straight off. He adjusts his glasses. “But I’ve been telling him to chill, you’re a cool devil, you’re not like all of the others.”

Poor Mr. Strider, she finds herself thinking. “I require your assistance with something,” she says, and Mr. Strider immediately looks uncomfortable. “It is only a boost. I need to check the roof.”

“Okay. What roof?” 

What roof? She struggles to recall any distinct features she had seen in the Memory of Light. Nothing comes to mind. “I will know when I see it,” she says. 

“Bro used to make me run around here when I was a kid. I know a lot of great places where you can see everything—a lot of everything, at least.” 

He leads her closer to the Flit, then, as promised, helps her up: first by breaking and entering into a small apartment building with a collapsed roof, then scaling a few floors of an abandoned clock tower. It’s a good view: the only place blocked from her sight is Veilgarden. She has a good look of Spite and the Flit, and even some of Mahogany Hall. 

“You good?” he says. 

“Yes.” Kind of. She has, more or less, chosen a selection of roofs at will; but she does not want to trouble Mr. Strider much longer, nor to interfere with what Ms. Lalonde might need. “Send my love to Ms. Lalonde,” she says. 

“Love?” Mr. Strider says. He blinks at her over his glasses. “You know what that is?” 

*** 

One roof passes, then another. She tries to not think of it much. When she looks down at the narrow alleys, dark as the Italian canals at night in the lightless parts of the city, she feels vertigo. She fixes her eyes instead on the horizon, or, more often, the nearest thing she can cling to in case the tiles give way beneath her weight. 

At last, on top of a tall building three blocks from a crumbling church and within sight of Mahogany Hall, she sees goat hooves stomped around the chimneys. She bends down to investigate, then climbs to the top of the chimney. More hoofprints. They seem to vanish into the chimney. 

“Hello?” she says, cautious. She hears something that sounds like a cough, but probably is just a brick coming loose. 

She is about to leave when the chimney says, “Kanaya?” At this Kanaya has to hold onto the stacks to not fall onto the street. There’s a sound below, carried up to her ear. “I knew you would come.”

“Who is this?” Kanaya says, pressing her ear against the hole. 

“Who cares who it is,” the person says. “What’s the point. You’re here and you want to know. Come and see me if you dare.” 

“What story are you on?” 

The quiet, Kanaya takes it, is what whoever it is thinks she deserves. 

She shimmies down the building and goes in through a side door. It was, in better times a house; now it has been stripped, ransacked, and abandoned. The dust is so thick that it is not just content to form layers of dead skin on the floor and molding, but also insists on hanging ambient in the air like persistent shroud over her face. She brings a handkerchief to her mouth and tries to breathe through it. She can see the whorls of her inhalation, the forceful coughing of her exhale. 

Higher and above. The stairs creak and there are boards that have given up on life entirely. She cuts her leg on broken wood climbing up; she gets splinters on her hands from touching the walls to keep her balance as she walks around the holes. But soon, on the third floor, she has found the empty room, the one where the dust is less but the smell fouler. There were strange scrapes and clear spots in the other rooms, and she understands now that the people here have brought the furniture to this place. Goat hooves have left tracks in the dust. 

“I have arrived,” she says. She’s standing in front of a half-open door, her fingertips resting against the wood. 

“Open it. But be careful that you don’t hit Sollux’s bed.”

Inside the windows have been blacked, and the furniture is worn or broken. Sitting on an ornate wooden chair is a woman with long, black hair and curling horns, and with goat hooves beneath her skirts. On a mattress, covered and warmed by old newspapers, is a man who looks as though he’s been cut nearly in two. She can see the pinkness of his lungs as they strain for breath, surrounding a liquid blackness that leaks around his exposed heart; it mingles, but does not blend, with a thin white fluid dripping from his aorta. There is a fire burning, and it makes the whole room stink of shit and cut-open bowels. The smell and sights are so singularly awful, when the goat woman looks at her with her huge, protruding eyes, Kanaya nearly throws up. Those eyes, she thinks, are Overgoat eyes. They see too much. 

“Aradia?” Kanaya says, trying to sound pleasantly surprised and not as though she is struggling to keep her stomach from turning itself inside out. “You look different.”

“I am different,” Aradia says. “But I don’t care anymore. I don’t need to care anymore. I can tell you anything that has happened—come closer.” 

“They said you and Mr. Captor were dead,” Kanaya says, approaching Aradia slowly. “I saw you dead, ten years ago.” 

“Yes, when Vriska killed me.” It’s so matter-of-fact. Kanaya thought it would be more angry. Vriska had killed Tavros first, tossed his dying body into a river to be sure there would be nothing to save, killed him for nothing more than the pleasure of winning a game of dice. Then she killed Aradia, then Sollux, then went to Kanaya, begging for her life. That is how it was. “But Terezi was kind enough to take us here to recover. Just as you took her here to save her life. Do you want to sit down?” 

“I’m fine,” she says. There’s nowhere to sit that isn’t covered in—whatever it is Mr. Captor is producing. 

“It won’t take long, anyway,” Aradia says. “She’s not here. She will never come here. I chased her on the waves, all the way to the Iron Republic. But we were all changed there. Me, Sollux, Tavros, and Vriska, too. Look.” She moves her hair away from her back and leans forward, so Kanaya can see the back of her neck: the skin is pitted and ringed like the trunks of trees. At the center of the rings is white and red, bone and blood, and surrounding it is a great scab. “I had an Overgoat growing from my neck, and she stole it from me and wears its head on her shoulder. I hope it gives her nightmares. I hope she spends the rest of her life running from one island to another. But I don’t know where she is, and now that you have found us, I will have to move us because when you find Vriska you will lead her right here.”

“Not intentionally,” she says. She gazes into Mr. Captor, the straight cut down the middle of his body. Something about his—blood makes her uneasy. “The changes in Vriska—were they the eyes?” 

“The eyes. And other things. Here.” She taps the center of her chest. A riddle of some kind? What are the possible answers: her heart? A breast? Just one single breast? 

Mr. Captor’s blood, the black half, bubbles. It drips onto the mattress in deep pools. She has seen this before. “Did a young gentleman come by here,” she says, “hoping to help his sister?” 

“It’s a poison,” Aradia says, so plainly that a terror seizes Kanaya, a worse fright than the one that took her on the rooftop. She’s dizzy—she feels as though she is about to fall. She stands without saying goodbye and leaves the house fast as she can. Her legs and arms are cut, her clothes look as though a tiger has slashed them; she runs towards the street and hails a cab to Light Street. 

When she arrives, Mr. Strider the elder is puffing on a pipe by the gates. Mr. Strider the elder stares at Kanaya as she approaches and shakes his head. 

“Move,” Kanaya says anyway. 

“No can do, lady.” His voice has a strong American accent, with its nonsense vowels and the nasally pitch. He is not usually a pugilist, but it seems as though he has left his sword in the room; he cracks his knuckles and then his neck. “You wanted to come, you should have come through the windows like you usually do.”

“It’s vital. Of utmost importance. I am trying to save her soul,” she says. 

“Yeah. So why do I feel like you’re part of the reason she’s in trouble, anyway? Go away already, deviless. She doesn’t need you to fix this.” 

“I have a message for her,” Kanaya snaps. 

“You mean like some heavy-duty tongue-mouth excavation?” 

“I mean news about the poison she has ordered on her own behalf.” 

That gets him moving quickly enough. He vanishes into the house, locking the gates behind him. A few minutes later he comes back and lets her in. Mr. Strider the younger greets Kanaya in the house with a happy smile. 

“Didn’t know you were visiting,” Mr. Strider the younger says. “Did you get to that place in Spite?”

“Where is your sister?” she says. 

“Christ. A man tries to make some conversation.” 

He takes her to the library. Once she is there, she goes straight to Ms. Lalonde, sitting in the back surrounded by candles and dead rats. She is, happily, alive. 

“I hope you know I had to beg Dirk,” Ms. Lalonde says. “What’s wrong?” 

“I do not know,” Kanaya says. Now that Ms. Lalonde is in front of her, she can’t think of what she thought she would do once she gained audience with her. She gestures at the window. “I saw your brother in Spite, with a bottle—”

“This one?” Ms. Lalonde holds it up against a candle. In this light it is clear that the liquid itself is not black entirely, closer to the deep green of a night forest. “It’s fertilizer Ms. Harley uses for growing her special plants.” 

“So you are not planning on taking your own life with it by draining the venom whole?” 

“No! What gave you that idea?” Ordinarily she would have gone to Kanaya and, perhaps, squeezed her shoulder or her hand. Right now she is severing the heads of rats with gardening shears, a distracted look in her eyes. 

“You do not know how angry you have made me today,” Kanaya says, stepping closer. She trips over a rat and has to hold onto the wall to untangle its tail from her laces. “How anxious you have made me.” 

“That sounds troubling.” 

Out of personal tragedy, Kanaya kicks another dead rat out of its place in the circle. “I have seen such horrible things today.” 

“What was it that you saw?” Ms. Lalonde says. She decapitates another rat, and winces. “It must really be something, to shake a devil.” 

Aradia’s wood ring scars, Mr. Captor with his chest split open, Vriska shifting from memory to half-vision. Vengeance, blood, it is everywhere and on everything. One comes to the Neath to start a new life, but the Neath is never far enough divorced from the old. There are telegram wires from the Surface, news from Hell, and constant waves of people from both places. 

“I love you, you silly girl,” Kanaya says. She blinks a few times too rapidly, to shake the nightmarish visions out of her eyes, so she misses what colors Ms. Lalonde’s face turn, or what expression crosses it. “Though I know you do not wish me to.” 

“What makes you think I wouldn’t?” How could she not have, with the way Ms. Lalonde talked of the way a devil loves, the thing she thinks they lack? Ms. Lalonde, seeing Kanaya’s face, makes a gestures like she’s thinking about throwing her hands up in the air. Rat blood goes flying up. She tosses it to the plant. “But it’s—Kanaya, would you still claim to love me if my soul were gone?” 

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. Would a human?” 

“My mother would!” She is distressed and unhappy with Kanaya’s answer. Kanaya removes her gloves, takes off her hat, and then puts them on again. She does not know whether she should leave, whether she is still wanted here. She exhales in a way like a sigh, then exhales again, as though she is trying to push her diaphragm through the floor of her being. “We don’t have much time. I have to finish this spell before the candle melts all the way down.” 

The ancients thought life could be breathed into things. And now Rose takes Kanaya by the face, her palms warm and smelling of rats and sweet plant oils. In the space of half a breath, she moves and adjusts her lower body so it spills across Kanaya’s lap. She tilts Kanaya’s head back, up as though to receive a drink of water falling from above, and kisses her. And meanwhile the Botanical Professor’s mean plant grows verdant, grows vicious, grows strong. 

***

Kanaya wakes up groggy to the very bone. Again, a morning. Damp, foggy, wet beyond measure. It’s so humid that the feathers inside her pillows seem to be drooping, and it takes her an hour to do her hair. 

Tucked in her door is a letter from Mr. Strider the elder: stay away from my sister-cousin-daughter—he claims the word is foreign and helpfully includes the translation in a footnote—deviless, soulless louse, it goes on for a while. She will make sure to have someone see it for the sake of besmirching his reputation. 

Today she goes to the Brass Embassy again. “I require notes on the movement of certain devils,” she says: Aradia Megido, Tavros Nitram, Sollux Captor, and Vriska Serket. 

“I can’t get to it,” says today’s desk devil. “I threw my back out wooing a young gentleman and now it hurts to move.”

She drops a tiny bag full of moonpearls on his desk. “You are not even subtle.” 

“I mean it. I pinched a nerve. My leg burns.”

Five minutes later, he escorts Kanaya to the infernal records and watches while Kanaya climbs up the ladders to get the boxes herself. The shelves go from floor to ceiling and the boxes are stacked two-deep. It takes her almost an hour to get all the files she needs, and even then the desk devil makes Kanaya leave her bag at the desk and look the files over in a special room. She is not allowed to take notes or to write on the pages. 

Megido, Aradia. Last seen in Spite. The sighting date is just last month. Transfigured by the Iron Republic, 345 Ov.Cor 331N VIII. Do not approach. It is the same for Mr. Captor. Current residence in Spite. An incomprehensible citation next to their names, and a warning to not approach. For Mr. Nitram, he is somewhere below the waters, in the Zee. It is only Vriska who is still missing, last seen in the Labyrinth of Tigers six months ago, then never again. She, too, has a citation, as long and mysterious as any. A typewritten note is in the file, the paper pale and brittle as a dead moth’s wing. It was held over a flame, to reveal the invisible ink. “Continue searching,” it reads. 

When she returns to the room, the desk devil tells her the Blind Barrister has confiscated her bag and coat while she was looking at the records. 

“Subcontracting?” the desk devil says. “She cited subcontractor violations.” 

She goes down to infernal affairs again. The Barrister is talking to someone, a human with milky eyes and a bad hat. Kanaya kicks the human away and says to the Barrister, “Return my things to me.”

“Shoo,” she says to the human. One the human has scuttled away, the Barrister licks her teeth, then says, “Here for your vials of blood?”

“They are hazardous samples cultivated from Neath-raised hell plants.” 

“Whatever,” she says. “Who cares what they are. The point is that you are suspended as a subcontractor for the Brass Embassy until infernal affairs has finished reviewing your recent actions! I have flagged Vriska’s files. According to orders from high above, anyone who goes looking for them who is not under the direct employ of Doc Scratch of infernal affairs is to be immediately let go as a collector of human souls. Farewell, Kanaya. I would say good luck but we both know you’re going back to Hell.”

“You aren’t interested in what I found?” Kanaya says. 

“I already know what you found. I thought, maybe… the Memory of Light… I can’t see them anymore.” She says it with the kind of soft embarrassment she used before: Oh, Kanaya, boo hoo, so much time has passed. She should have been an actress and not a lawyer. Kanaya picks up one of Terezi’s pens and twirls it around her fingers. “I thought you would see something useful. But instead you went prancing around Spite like a drunk goat.”

Kanaya watches Terezi, the way she holds onto her desk, the soft flesh of her wrists pointed outward, two fingers of her left hand touching the ivory handle of the cane. She considers snapping the pen nib. Terezi is blind and prefers the typewriter; but for some reason she has kept this calligraphy set here. She was not even good at calligraphy before. “Aradia says for you to go away,” Kanaya says. 

“Aradia is dead. She went to chase Vriska on the sea. I told her to wait, but she got stuck in the Iron Republic. And she never came back.”

“Terezi, when was the last time you saw the files?”

“Never! I’m blind, remember?” 

“You make this no fun,” she says.

“You came to me a few days ago asking about your friend’s soul and now you have left it to be snatched by that bald guy while you go sniffing for Vriska! You will still have a few days before the hearing finds you guilty of being unemployable. Think of it as a vacation. A chance to reprioritize.” 

“And what of your priorities?” 

“They have always been the same.” She’s put the cane down on the ground between her legs. Her thumb moves over her cane some more, tracing the dragon’s snout, the gleaming, poison ruby eyes. 

*** 

THE DOCTOR IS [IN] THE DOCTOR WILL [NOT] SEE YOU

The foxfire candle stubs have a greener light than she remembers. Kanaya briefly considers the past, the ebbing flow, the tide, a tiny boat beating against the ceaseless, unreturning waves of a… a bay… or a harbor… the ocean. Something like that. She has probably read it in some novel about the American railways.

I Heard You Were Looking For The Spider Captain

That is quite the presumption. Many people use this office.  
Mr. Slick could have been the one to make the request.

Mr Slick Facilitates Hells Business With Polythreme   
What Do You Want For Her

Hee hee. 

What   
You Need Her Location I Have It  
I Want Something In Return That Is All   
Something You Dont Have Currently 

But by law am owed.   
Have you ever thought that the Spider Captain may be more valuable as a rogue variable in Hell’s plans, one that works predictably in my favor?   
Who knows what mischief Ms. Lejion or the Blind Barrister might get up to if they used too productively. 

What  
Is This A Joke

No. 

I Think You Still Need Vriska For Some Reason   
Something Important Or Because She Makes You Whuffle Chuffle To Yourself Behind Your Dumb Sign  
And You Think That Terezi And I Will Probably Be Able To Root Her Out Better Than You Can   
If Terezi Finds Her First She Wont Let Vriska Leave Alive Shell Kill Her And Throw Her On The First Transport Back To The Surface   
But I Am Willing To Negotiate   
I Am Willing To Make A Fair Exchange

Kanaya.   
Why is it necessary to debase a soul before extracting it? 

Is That A Yes  
Thats A Yes Right

Yes, it’s fine.   
I will sign the contract as soon as you can answer that question. 

Its Easier To Take A Soul When The Owner And The Churchs Influences Are Estranged  
The Human State Is Naturally Wretched   
But The Soul Has Value  
It Has Something  
I Dont Know What I Dont Think Anyone Does But  
Whatever It Is I Want It

Hello  
Should I Try Again 

It’s all right, Kanaya.   
I’m drawing up the contract.   
I was thinking of contraband you will offer. In case of failure.  
Hmm.   
Yes. Ms. Lalonde will do nicely. 

And now, Kanaya.   
Now I will give you a gift. 

*** 

When Kanaya wakes up, she is face down on the street, getting the imprint of bricks on her face. Tucked into her mouth are a pair of envelopes. The first contains a copy of a transcript, the second a pair of contracts: a copy of Rose Lalonde’s infernal contract, freshly signed and dated with confirmation of the soul’s taking, and a contract stipulating that Ms. Lalonde’s soul will be returned as soon as one (1) Vriska Serket is returned to the Brass Embassy, preferably alive. But it will also accept one (1) of Vriska’s soul. A cruel joke, Kanaya thinks, folding the papers neatly in half and tucking them away into her jacket. She thinks of Rose admiring her human legs in the mirror, her face wistful, her eyes like lightning-struck sand, hardened and immobile. She feels like throwing up. 

She does end up retching and coughing, and when she does, she notices something strange about her spittle: it glows. Her body is hot, and hottest around her abdomen. Slowly, she unbuttons her jacket, then her blouse. Housed in her body is a shard of glass, painless and bright. 

***

Where to go, where to go. She returns to the place in Spite where she found Aradia and Sollux, but they are gone now, the furniture now charred blocks stuffed into an overfull fireplace and the stairs smashed through with hammers. Kanaya has to come in through the window for clues, though by that point it is more to find a place to rest for a while. It turns out being turned into a portable lamp does wonders for one’s stamina. 

The added light does one good thing—which is to say, she uses herself as a flashlight, searching the thick, scattered dust for signs. Aradia said Kanaya might lead Vriska to her, and now she can see proof Vriska was once here: slash marks from awful swordplay, burn marks on the walls. Someone dragging a large body through the doorframe. The imprint of a woman leaning against the wall before giving chase. Kanaya takes her gloves off again, just to check, since shafts of light seem to be breaking through her fingers. It will be more convenient when they finally make it all the way through, she decides, because she will not need to bare her midriff for light, but another part of her worries what will happen when the rest of her breaks apart. 

She puts her glove back on, and is about to leave when something slams into her like a Clay Man’s fist. The ‘something’ hisses and spits and tries to claw Kanaya’s face off, and smells like cats. It is Ms. Lejion. 

“I will kill you,” Kanaya swears, which only seems to invigorate Ms. Lejion. Ms. Lejion’s claws slice through her dress, into her jacket, have her blood under the nail. It takes effort for Kanaya to drive a knee into Ms. Lejion’s gut, and then sheer luck that when Ms. Lejion cries, “You can’t make a getaway with me in purrsuit!” and tries to dive back onto Kanaya, Kanaya’s foot is perfectly positioned such that Ms. Lejion catches herself by the throat on it. From there it’s two swift stomps to the kidneys. Then she feels bad and helps Ms. Lejion sit up. 

“What are you doing here?” Kanaya says. 

“Terezi told me you were aiding and abetting Vriskers! I can’t forgive Vriskers for what she did.”

“Killing Tavros?” 

“She mailed me a cat in a box!”

“I’m trying to catch her, too,” she says, but Ms. Lejion regards her unfavorably anyway. “Look,” Kanaya says, and produces the two contracts. 

“Ooohhh,” she says. “You’re doing this for a human? That’s even more touching. I purromise I won’t tell Terezi anything.” 

“Ugh. Yes.” There goes a whole slew of whispered secrets and cryptic clues. Doing business with Ms. Lejion can be a demoralizing event. “Now I need your help. Where do these track lead to?” 

“Do I have to keep it a secret?”

“They will be worth more that way,” Kanaya points out, but Ms. Lejion whines until Kanaya says, “Oh, fine.” 

Ms. Lejion is a far better tracker than Kanaya has ever imagined she could be. In short order, she has led Kanaya down to an abandoned section of the Docks. Silk webs the windows like hairy frost; one has the impression that many detached eyes have arrived here by way of sorrow-spiders. It smells like the soft, brineless salt of tears.

“I have to get back to the Labyrinth,” Ms. Lejion says. “But Vriskers has to be somewhere here.” 

The light’s extended through a finger now, and she uses it as a light. Most of the shacks are empty, and when she opens the doors spiders skitter away from the brightness like nervous fog. On the third-to-last shack on the lane, a spider jumps for her face. She slaps it down and sticks her finger into its eyes. In the second-to-last one, she finds blankets, a kind angry scrawl on the walls, broken glass on the floor. Fresh blood dripping on everything. Bloodied maps on wood planks. Was Vriska using this as a desk? 

There are dozens of them, some drawn with a strong hand, others lousy. She grabs a bunch of the newer ones and tugs it taut in between her hands. Zee maps! Aside from this, she gains nothing from them. She stuffs them into her jacket and keeps looking for clues. A journal? No, Vriska doesn’t like to talk to herself. She wants an audience, wants their sympathy or their disgust. If she were talking to a deaf person, she’d write a novella for them and stand over them while they worked on a two-page response. 

For about ten minutes Kanaya is convinced Vriska has written letters to her and left them scattered in the shack. But after brushing away many cobwebs and squishing several spiders, she has found letters to Terezi, letters to Aradia, to Mr. Nitram, Mr. Zahhak, Ampora, and even the Fish Princess. They are all dated for months ago, maybe even into last year. Kanaya rifles through them, hoping to find some vicious pleasure in Vriska’s destitution, but it goes stale before she even finishes reading the one to Ampora. Fuck you, Ampora, I’ll steal your yacht and burn it and then we’ll see where you’re at! She stifles a yawn. 

*** 

It is not an easy thing, finding someone who has both the means and the inclination to take her to the place marked on the map. First she asks around the Dock, but then Terezi arrives, her eyes red as a bloodhound’s and determination driving her steps with hard, clacking propulsion and she has to duck for hours as Terezi and her gang of detectives sniff about for clues. No doubt Ms. Lejion leaked to Terezi, and no doubt the Docks will now be useless to her. It takes nearly another day for her to find Ampora and cozy up to him enough for him to agree to take her to the island marked on the map. For free, even. At least, monetarily free. He insists that she suffer his companionship. 

“Can’t make you part of the crew,” Ampora says. “You’ll scare ‘em all off, they hate devils. Cowardly sniveling guys but I love ‘em, they work hard and they give me anything I ask for. But you can stay in my room, if you want, I got tons of ships in a bottle.” 

“I will be fine in my room,” Kanaya says. “Ships in a bottle. Heh. You sounded like a drowning frog.”

“Kan, frogs can’t be drowned. What kind of fuckin’ education did you get.” But he reaches for the soft skin under his jaw and plucks at it nervously. He has, in recent months, been trying to grow a beard. “So, so you said this is some special soul fishin’ mission from Fef? How’s she lookin’? You think she’ll let me come back?” 

“I am sure she is thinking of you.” 

The Hell Princess banned Ampora from returning to Hell after he killed a human professor and his devil companion. Killed for what? His vanity, she supposes. There were rumors that Ampora had fallen in love with one of them, or both. There was a fight in the Embassy, or in the Shuttered Palace. Ampora came in screaming about antiques, or… There was something about an elephant, she thinks. Either way there was blood on the floor and a good amount of new ivory in the market. 

Over the next week, Ampora will occasionally lean against the railing of his boat and stare wistfully out into the ocean. It’s only when they are approaching the island that Kanaya asks him what he’s looking at. 

“London,” he says. London is south. She bites the inside of her cheek. Somewhere in her gut the glass twists, seems to throb, against the lower wall of the hole. Ampora offers her a cigar, and when she doesn’t take it, sticks it into his mouth without cutting or lighting it and sighs with the air of a lovelorn Romeo. “Fef must be in her zubmarine, followin’ me from below. Just like you’re runnin’ after Vriska.” 

“‘ _Just_ like?’” 

He is trying to bite off the end of the cigar with his teeth. Around the blunt stub, he says, “Kan, you know me and Vriska had something back in the day.” 

“Mhmm.” She’s thinking about Istanbul, where she took Vriska after that relationship fell out. A bad idea in retrospect. Vriska had been born among the German Lutheran missionaries in India, and her tastes ran strongly towards sausages and emotionally disturbed cabbages. 

“And I know you were raised by them fucking nuns and all, I get that, with your high Mary or whatevers, you feel me? It’s been a while since I left her, with all that shit of hers, and—” She tunes out. She has noticed that she can see her reflection in the Zee waters. A second later, something falls from Ampora’s fingers and splashes in the water. It’s the cigar, making dizzy cartwheels into the deep. Ampora sniffs into a handkerchief. “Gotta shave,” he says. “Fucking beard makes me look like one of those sleazy bohemians.” 

*** 

The island looks as though at any moment it might fall back into the sea. It’s craggy, low, and half of it is eaten by ice, though there is no ice on the water. There are no trees, no greenery more ambitious than thin, yellowing grass and gray moss. On the ice, there are occasional shadows that look as though they might be wolves or bears. “Probably just rabbits,” Ampora says.

Ampora and some of his human zailors row her to the beach and they do a quick scout. They find a heap of rocks on the southern side, and Ampora gives her instructions: they’ll be back here in three days. If she wants to come back, then put a lantern here and wait on the beach and they will send a rowboat for her. Just follow the light, so to speak. If there are no lights on the sixth day, they will leave her here, and Ampora will name a rock on the island in her name, though he will call this island Eridan Ampora’s Bend. And then she is left alone with some of Ampora’s supplies and considerable amounts of brandy. 

***

One of the maps she took from the shack seems to be a land map for the island, with beaches named things like ‘Squish’ and ‘China’ and ‘the Clap,’ tall rocks numbered one through six, and mysterious scratches done in red pen. Something about the scrawls also seem to indicate there is a walking path. Of course, once Kanaya reaches the spot it’s supposed to be on, there’s nothing but a stomped-flat flower. 

Eventually she stops at a pond to feed. You would think digestion would be a problem, given her current situation, but she is hungry nearly all the time, and she is almost never in pain. 

There are many small ponds on the island, some no more than glorified puddles, some deep enough to bathe in, and she knows without having to check that all of them are salty. Nothing grows in them. The dark waters reflect her like a mirror perfected, and the result is as disturbing as it is entrancing. When she looks deeper, the glass shard twinges. She ignores it until a wave of nausea ends with her spitting blood onto the dirt. Canned ham drops into the waters, untouched, while she wheezes. She reaches for the brandy.

Someone puts a foot against the bottle. She cranes her head up and sees nothing; turns her head a little further, sees Vriska in a tattered coat and that hideous Overgoat skin.

“Vriska?” she says, staring up in bewilderment, though this is what she desired, this is what she wanted. Vriska grabs the bottle of brandy and then runs off. “Wait!”

Her gut throbs. She ignores it and runs after Vriska, splashing through puddles and mud, until Vriska turns back on her heel and punches Kanaya’s shoulder hard enough to make her slip and fall flat on her back. 

“Fuck!” Vriska says. “You?” She puts her foot on Kanaya’s chest. “Look who’s come back after all this time! Just like I knew you would.” 

Kanaya swats at the leg above her. It’s like hitting a custard, an uncertain plasmic wobble suggestive of the deceased or the poorly resurrected. Vriska’s boot grinds against her cheek. This time when Kanaya stands, she tosses Vriska’s weight off her easily, until they are standing eye-to-eye. Eye-to-many-eyes. The seven eyes open and close independently of one another and are never looking in the same direction at the same time. The left side of her face is puffy and swollen, like a giant bruise. Her skin has the hue of spoiled milk. Beneath the blankets, she wears the Overgoat’s skin, the edges ragged and bloody. “I cannot believe you,” she says. “You mean to tell me that you are dead?” 

“Not dead, dumbfuck! No thanks to you! I’m hiding.” Vriska sticks her arm through Kanaya, a move that must have been meant to be a shove. It’s like cold goo punching through her, with only the barest hint of solidity; but her foot on Kanaya’s head feels heavy and real, and Kanaya’s arm still smarts. She makes footprints in the dirt as she heads back to the pond. Kanaya follows. 

“You weren’t hiding the last I saw of you,” Kanaya says. “In the Labyrinth of Tigers.”

“Noooooooo, I was hiding. You just don’t know the whole story, so you can’t appreciate my genius. Fuck. Whatever. I’m not even mad at you now. It’s water under the broken bridge. Fucking piece of shit.” Vriska bends down to scoop up the bottle of brandy and ransacks Kanaya’s supplies. She squats on the ground and holds the brandy between her knees; her left arm is still resolutely gone. From behind she looks solid enough, not ghostly at all, though at times a strange light threads through her. When Kanaya pushes Vriska, Vriska stumbles forward and kicks Kanaya to the ground. “Hussy!” she says, loading her arms with jerky and canned beans. She stares at Kanaya’s open clothes and sneers. “Bet you’re wishing you came with me now. How’ve you been? Want some brandy?”

“That’s mine.” 

Vriska tears into a strip of jerky and chews loudly. “I’ve been fucking great! I’ve been swell. I lost my ship and my crew but I don’t blame you. You wouldn’t have been helpful, anyway. You would’ve just drowned at sea.”

“Vriska,” Kanaya says. There’s so much to say. She settles on, “You should have asked for your arm back, instead of your eye.” 

“Whatever. Thanks for the grub!” 

“Wait!” To her surprise, Vriska does. She looks at Kanaya, her main pair of eyes going wide and wet with hope, and her body curving towards Kanaya beneath the coat and goatskin. Kanaya, looking at Vriska, feels something move inside her. A clot dislodged, and finding a new home somewhere else. “Vriska,” she says. “Won’t you come home with me?” 

“Nope. Sounds like someone didn’t bloody listen when I said ‘hiding!’” 

“Who are you hiding from? The Barrister? Your creditors?” 

“She wishes she could bite me.” 

“If it is her, then I can stay her. I have friends of influence now, you know.”

“Ha!” 

“I am serious. I know a lawyer who has some sway over her. I can keep her from you long enough for you to escape back to Hell.” 

“Hell!” Vriska spits, then looks back at Kanaya. “I’m never going down there. And you’re a damned fooooooool if you think I’d go back. I’d rather go back to the Surface.” 

“You’d die the second you saw the sun.” 

“Sure. But it’d be better than staying here or down there. Bye.”

This time Kanaya makes sure to grab onto Vriska’s arm. It’s so bony—she’s amazed she isn’t grinding Vriska’s bones just by holding onto them. “Do not try to leave me.” 

“Rich! Rich coming from you, Grand Abandoner!” 

“I have come all this way to see you, because I could no longer bear to not know what has happened to you—”

“Your own fault!”

“—if you had any love for me, if you have ever loved me—”

“—then you never would’ve left me to begin with, shrew!” 

“Ugh,” Kanaya says, letting go. “You are so childish.”

“And you’re a real bitch,” Vriska says. But she looks a little softer now. An inch more inclined to listen to her. She looks lonely and diminished, and Kanaya is glad, because it means she will be more pliable and easier to lead. “So you missed me? You really missed me? Haha. Sucks to be you.”

“Yes, fine, I have missed you,” she says. Looking at Vriska now, no longer trying to escape or abuse her, she feels the stirrings of—guilt, she thinks. She would be a liar if she were to say Vriska means nothing to her, to claim Vriska is no more than some rake she fell in with many decades ago and has since forgotten. To say Vriska is nothing but nothing. The truth is, she is something: a pain in the ass. But just as one grows familiar with the pains of an old wound, one grows used to Vriska, given time. She steels herself and kisses Vriska’s cheek. To her surprise, Vriska doesn’t hiss or push her away. She holds onto Kanaya and kisses her back. “Vriska,” she says. “Vriska. Take me to where you are living.”

***

Vriska takes her to a hole in the ground. 

“Really?” Kanaya says. “Here?” 

“Shut up. You asked, this is what you get.” 

There are candle stubs, oil, coal, a cast iron skillet that most likely has not seen much use. Trash and broken mirrors litter one half of the room, and shoved against one wall is a pile of clothes that is presumably a bed. Kanaya considers just asking, How have you survived since your ship crashed? Are you alive at all? Should I send you to the Tomb Colonists? Though there will be a scandal in the Colonies if they happen to receive a devil. Though she should think they will take pity on something as sad as Vriska. 

She opens the bottle of brandy and offers the first drink to Vriska. Vriska takes it and gnaws on the neck of the bottle. 

“How long have you been here?” she says. She sits on the bed and sinks almost to the dirt floor.

“Dunno. Months. Years! Is it Christmas yet? It was Christmas when left the Iron Republic. Fuck. What year was it?” She grabs the Overgoat’s head and gives it a shake. “Useless thing,” she says after a moment. 

“I don’t understand how you got here.”

“What, you didn’t already put it all together? You left me, heartlessly! I made a shit ton of money on the seas. And then—and then Aradia! And Tavros. And Sollux, I guess. They came after me and I couldn’t do jackshit! So I went to the Iron Republic to escape them. I lost my ship, my crew, but hey, I got this sweet eye. And I’ve been like this ever since.” She sits next to Kanaya on the blankets, on the side with the many eyes. 

Kanaya shivers. She stares at the crumbling dirt wall of the hole, then says, “Did you come to the Labyrinth of Tigers to see me?” 

“Yeah,” Vriska says after a moment. “I knew you’d be there. So I decided to check it out. No. Not you. I was just looking for something. And then I saw you there flossing your teeth with the lace on your gloves.” Her many eyes swivel around in an exaggerated roll. She’s let the blankets fall from her shoulders, so now she is only wearing the goatskin and, beneath that, the coat. “So, what have you been up to? What made you miss me so much? And what’s with the fucking glow?” 

“It was a gift,” Kanaya says. “From Hell.” 

“Tell me about it.” 

“I became involved in soul extractions. I performed Abstractions for the society crowd. And then there was this human.” 

“You fell in love? You fell in love and all they did was give you a free lamp?” 

“It is more complex than that,” Kanaya says. “Stop grinning. There is no humor in this story.” 

“Kanaya, it’s okay! It happens to everyone. You fall in love, you fuck up, and you get a slap on the wrist from the devil in charge. Big whoop.” She yawns and kicks her legs out in front of her, but her eyes are fixed on Kanaya. “Just tell me where you met.”

“A university party. I am working on acquiring the Botanical Professor’s soul, and she allowed me to accompany her to their annual New Year dinner. Then I met a young woman, a writer—”

“A writer,” Vriska says. Her eyes perform the most remarkable trick. 

“—and for a while I worked to possess her soul, I worked hard for it. I wanted it for myself, it was more than I ever wanted anything. But another devil took it before I could make my claim.” 

“And?” 

“And I killed the devil for it.” 

Vriska sets the bottle on the ground. She stands up. Kanaya has a moment where she is staring, puzzled, at Vriska’s lumpy form, before Vriska punches her straight in the ear. It’s like having a rail spike driven through her brain. Kanaya falls over, then tries to get up to escape, but only ends up rolling around in the dirt. Kanaya is certain there’s blood coming from her ear, but the first thing her stupid hand does touch her mouth. Vriska cocks her leg back, as though she’s planning to slam it into Kanaya. Instead she just shoves her heel into Kanaya’s ribs. 

“Vriska,” she says—struggling, again, beneath her boot. 

“You think I’m stupid?” Vriska shouts. Her voice echoes in Kanaya’s head. “I saw your contracts! I know about Scratch. He sent you to get me. Well, he’s never going to get me. I’ll kill you first! No!” She clutches at her chest, and for the first time Kanaya sees the sparks leaping from Vriska’s chest, a light that makes the glass in her stomach suddenly grow lively. Kanaya rolls, enough to dislodge Vriska’s foot, and stands. Vriska is kneeling on the ground, clutching her chest, groaning. The Overgoat skin slips over her shoulder, so it looks as though she is growing a second head from her chest. She touches her chest, then holds her hand out. It’s covered by a strange, green liquid, and Kanaya recoils from it. “So you can see it, too? Fuck, fuck. I need—” 

That’s as far as she gets before she screams in outrage. She is trying to stuff the thing back into her chest. 

Kanaya recognizes the green color of that liquid. And she remembers the contract, Aradia, tapping her chest. Vriska came back changed, she said. No longer the same. She struggles to find a way to say what surely must be the dumbest thing to come from her mouth, but she manages it. “Is that a soul?” 

“Noooooooo. Fuck! It fucking hurts! I’m fucking dying.” She snivels and crawls over to the trash heap, picks up one bit of broken glass, then another, tossing them to one side when they prove unsatisfactory. “I’m dying, and you don’t even care!” 

“I can help,” she says. She steps, carefully, around the glass and kneels next to Vriska. “Come back to the Embassy with me.”

“No! I’m not giving Scratch anything!” 

“I hate to say this, but he may be helping you,” she says, putting her hand on Vriska’s head in case she needs to yank her back by the hair. 

“Yeah?” Vriska says. “Help this.” 

With the broken mirror glass, she stabs Kanaya in the gut. Then she grabs a hold of the implanted mirror shard in Kanaya, the gift from Scratch, and yanks it out. 

“Wonder what great memory’s in here,” Vriska sneers, holding the Memory of Light into the air. Her form is fading into the light, and when Kanaya looks again, she’s vanished. Kanaya rises to her feet, clutching at the new, empty space in her gut. The spot is wet and growing wetter. Water? No, she realizes. Blood. 

*** 

She’s unconscious long enough that she’s stopped bleeding when she wakes. When she tries to push herself up with her hands to get at the watch in her pocket, her palms skid on bloody dirt. 

It takes an hour to get back to her feet and check on herself. Physically she is remarkably fine. The bleeding has stopped and the wound has healed in an unattractive, but serviceable fashion. It looks like she is recovering from a deep ax wound, but she will accept this over death. She’s still glowing, but less so than before. It’s already fading from her fingers, the light falling like soft powder. So that’s why, she thinks. So that’s why Scratch stuck that thing in me. I wouldn’t have been able to see her otherwise. 

So is it true, that Vriska has gotten herself a soul? It is not the impossibility she once thought it was. The Iron Republic can change all things: turn a man into a blob, turn a woman into a sheep. So why not this? She feels a nervous rattle in her chest, one that quickly works out to her skin, up to her shoulders, up her jaw, down her spine, and has to shake like a soaked dog to rid herself of the feeling—but it creeps back in anyway. Soon she is flat on her back, lying on the dirt and laughing to herself. A soul, Vriska? Yet she is so horrible, so insufferable, so impossible! She laughs until she tears open her wound and starts bleeding again. Then she concentrates on not moving. 

She falls asleep. When she wakes up, she returns south to light the lantern and wait on the beach. She’s set herself up to wait a long while, but when she squints, she sees a rowboat zigzagged by the tides with no one on it. When it comes closer, she plunges into the water, wades up to the boat, and looks: there are two dead zailors inside, and only a single oar. 

She holds onto the boat, contemplating whether to accept it or throw it back into the ocean. It is Vriska’s work: the two zailors are missing their left arms and their left eyes. In that case, it will be better to wait. You can always rely on Vriska to botch her opening, or the landing, or something in the middle. The trouble is when she botches everything, yet still comes out the winner. 

*** 

The zailors come onto shore by rowboat. They come, rowing and bleeding and shouting at one another to stop being such a wimp, you’ll be alive soon enough. The zailors she found dead in the first boat are up again, working hard at stuffing their torn eyes back into the sockets and stitching their limbs back on. They tell her the same story as the others: they were making their rounds when a royal ship came sailing out of nowhere, a blind devil on the bow. So they turned back early, and when they were nearly at the island a devil appeared in a mirror below decks and spiders, too, but everywhere where the devil was not. Zailors tossed themselves into the Zee from sheer terror. 

“Devils! We hate devils!” they say, apparently unaware that Ampora himself is a devil, too. “And spiders!” Kanaya stares at them in disbelief. Has Ampora only hired arachnophobes? They are so frightened it seems as though they preferred death by water than facing a webspinner. Zailing is a risky profession for many reason; but while death may be variable in the Neath, death by water has always been an especially grisly end, and one from which no human has returned. 

“I will go back to the ship and put an end to this threat,” Kanaya says. “And require two zailors to row me back.” 

“Row yourself,” says a zailor. The others nod their heads in agreement. “And stay away from our souls!” 

Lucky for her, it doesn’t take her long to make it to the ship: an hour into her journey, she spies it crashed into the ice. 

Ampora is on an ice floe, shivering and soaked. She takes pity and rows up to him. “Your men are on the southern beach.”

“Kan,” he says. “Kan, save me. I can’t swim.” 

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she says. He clambers into the boat. His lips are blue, but at least he looks grateful. It’s sad, what’s happened to his coat. No doubt it was handmade. “Tell me everything that happened.”

“You think I know what the fuck went on? You were the one lookin’ for her, you tell me what happened! Spiders were comin’ out of the fuckin’ sky, Kan, the fuckin’ sky!” 

“We’re in the Neath. There is no sky.” He scowls and turns bluer. She pats him, awkwardly, on the back. “I will come get you after I find Vriska.” 

“You aren’t abandonin’ me are you?” he demands. “No way. I’m takin’ the boat and rowin’ back to London, I swear it.”

“Eridan,” she says, and he sits up straighter, his eyes bright and full of hope. “Give me your sprifing fork.”

He gives it to her. Right after, she forces him out of the boat and onto the ice floe again. 

Then she rows to Ampora’s ship and climbs up the rope ladder—there are spiders crawling up and down the whole thing, spiders she crushes beneath her heel, spiders that creep on her hands, larger spiders from who knows where, with their massive, hairy limbs and enormous eyes. Some of them shy away from her light, but most still seem interested in her. She makes it to the top and again is assaulted by spiders: spiders running along the floor in a black, moving carpet, spiders on the walls, spiders hanging from silk threads in mid-air. 

“Vriska!” she shouts. In her left hand she holds Ampora’s sprifing fork. “Vriska, where are you?” 

A sorrow-spider makes a leap for her eye. She bats it away just in time. The spiders get up her skirts, onto her body. She is beginning to see why the zailors abandoned ship, but she is from Hell and a devil, besides. She catches a spider in her teeth and kills it, then spits it onto the floor. It doesn’t seem to be very effective, but it’s satisfying.

Mirrors seem to be Vriska’s preferred way of travel, so she goes to the captain’s cabin, and is rewarded by Ampora’s collection of mirrors, many of them fallen to the ground and broken, but the one on his desk still intact. She stomps on the ground, keeps a hand by her face to swat away the sorrow-spiders, and fights to the mirror Ampora keeps on his desk. She gazes into it and says again, “Vriska!”

She hears Vriska’s laughter, from far away. She looks up, turns her head left and then right. She looks back into the mirror, and sees Vriska, pale as a ghost, behind her. Kanaya spins around and stabs at Vriska with the sprifing fork—her form shimmers and grows more solid when Kanaya reaches for her, but parts like falling water around the fork. 

“Ha!” Vriska shouts. A spider zips up the back of Kanaya’s leg; she yelps. Vriska moves in for a ghostly kiss, a creeping, slick experience like being shot in the face with cold oil. “Bet you didn’t think of that, huh? How are you going to get me without Scratch’s little glowball in your gut? Can’t even touch me now, can you?” 

She’s growing more corporeal the longer she stays near Kanaya. Kanaya watches her, carefully. “You could have escaped to anywhere, and you ended here?” 

“Anywhere? Please! I wanted to make sure you were dead! Dead, instead of running around trying to kill me!” She paces around Ampora’s desk, runs her hand along the desk. Then she flings the papers onto the floor. “You think I was going to let you get away with that? Bitch.” Kanaya steps closer, or tries. Vriska throws the mirror at her. It crashes against the wall. “Yeah, don’t think I don’t know what you’re planning! You can’t bring my body back, so you’re going to get my ‘soul?’ Like a bad girl like me could have a soul.” 

“Yes, if only it weren’t true,” Kanaya says. “I didn’t want to believe it either. It is wasted on you.” 

“Oh, please.” She sneers. “There are souls everywhere. You just don’t think mine’s special because I don’t have the one I was born with. Well, fucknuts for you, sweet cheeks. The way I see it, you’re the worse of us! Terezi, she’d just kill me, but you? You have to have my soul!” The ship lurches beneath Kanaya’s feet. Kanaya grabs onto the desk, but Vriska remains steady—years at Zee, or too incorporeal to care? “Tell Scratch I escaped! Tell him I got away. I was too much for you.”

“What? What are you planning?” 

“I don’t know,” Vriska says, lying baldly. “I’m trying to appeal to your good side. Your nice side! What if I died in the Iron Republic? What if this is all that’s left of me. At least if that human you’re so in love with loses her soul, she can amble around feeling melancholy and sad. But I lose this, I go poof! Into the bottle! Forever.”

“Until the day all souls are judged,” Kanaya says.

“Whatever. I might be dumped in Hades before then. How do I know?”

“I would care for you.” At this Vriska looks at Kanaya, startled like a newborn deer. Her mouth is open and innocent, the wetness of her mouth leaving a dark red mark on her lip. Kanaya takes Vriska by the wrist, and jabs the sprifing fork into Vriska’s chest. 

It’s the easiest she’s ever done it: the soul clings to the tines, green and goopy. It comes out like silk from a cocoon, like ink from a snail’s shell. She pulls and pulls, and at last it comes free. It’s so heavy; the fork bends beneath weight. Kanaya grabs the first bottle she sees, one occupied already by a ship, and stuffs it in, easing it through the neck then feeding more of it faster and faster, until it’s in. 

The ship within has displaced by the squelching, green soul, and within she thinks she can see Vriska’s face pressing against the curved glass walls, furious, hungry. What can Kanaya say in response? She feels little regret. In fact, she feels great relief at having corrected a great abnormality, a freakish abomination to man and devil alike. And such great relief to know that she has fulfilled her end of the contract. To know she will return to London and find things the way they were before. 

There is no great tragedy to soullessness, only in loneliness, and even then, only in its most awful, most absolute forms. A loneliness like the world swirling away from you while you press against the curved glass of the bottle, all fear and all anger long since fallen away. 

Yes, she had done this to Vriska. She will not hide from it. It was her who did this; and for love, of all things. 

She looks away from the bottle. All the spiders are gone. She is alone. At her feet is old glass and the Overgoat skin and the barren, sinking ship. And all above her are falling white sheets. 

*** 

The Blind Barrister comes by not long after to rescue them. Just as well: Ampora’s ship dies on the ice. Ampora weeps about it copiously on Kanaya’s shoulder until Terezi ushers him to the captain’s cabin. Humans find it disquieting to see devils showing emotions. 

It takes days for the Barrister to come for her. By the time she does, London is within sight; they will arrive in hours. Kanaya is sitting between two sets of masts with the bottle in her lap. “Hey!” the Barrister says, and sits across from her. “So that’s all that’s left of her?” 

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Kanaya says, holding the bottle closer to her. The sails above them billow and whistle. Are they made of silk, too? What a waste of good thread. 

“Now we really have nothing left between us.”

“Hmm. You said that last time, as well.”

“So I did.” Terezi sighs and spreads her legs vulgarly, even by devilish standards. She rests her head against a mast, exposes her blind eyes to the dark ceiling of the Neath. “You know why I did what I did, just as I understand why you did what you did. You did it for love! Or you thought you did it for love.” 

“You must have loved at some point,” Kanaya says, with a frown. 

Terezi counts on her fingers, one, two, three, four? Then she folds her fingers into her fist, tight and hot and secret to all. Behind her hand, she is smiling. “I read the contract. The copy of it on file. I won’t try to take it from you by force. But if I were to tell you something I know, something valuable, would you give it to me?” 

“It doesn’t matter what you tell me,” she says. “I will not make the exchange.”

“Then, take it as a gift. My intentions are pure! I don’t know why I am offering this on these terms,” she admits. “But I give it to you freely.” 

She doesn’t want to hear it. Kanaya studies Terezi’s face for any signs of jest. But for once she finds Terezi both serious and sincere. She nods her head. Fine, all right. 

“I was going through that book after our last conversation, and in certain texts, it is said that certain devils born of humans are born like any other man, with the choice to become one or the other. And for those who choose to be men, they are the scum of the Surface and the Neath alike, but they are at least still within the fold; and then there are the devils like us. If you were to try to put the soul back in us now, we’d lose our immortality. We’d age right there and then and turn into dust!” 

The devils like us: those of us who were born on the Surface and wandered for years, alone and hungry, only to meet in a tavern in Prussia on the night before a battle to drink, to laugh, to stare at one another and realize, yes! There are others like me in this world, after so many years alone. Looking into Terezi’s eyes now, Kanaya finds herself transported back to her youth once more: the innocence of their early banters, the cleanness of their fights. 

“Impossible,” she says. “If that were the case, then someone would have had to take the soul from those half-devils, sometime in their youth. No such thing would have been possible in my life.” 

“I never said they were credible texts.” 

She stands. Kanaya rises as well. She offers the Overgoat skin. “Aradia’s,” she says. “You may have use for it.”

“What is this, a dress?” She brings the skin to her face, sniffs, and then gags. Kanaya snickers while Terezi dry heaves, and is still suppressing sniggers when Terezi says, “I came here to tell you that Scratch has made me reverse my banishment of you from London. But it will take several weeks for the paperwork to go through, so you will be locked from your apartment until the desk devils can clear things for you.”

“Why do we have those things?” she demands. “Why do they exist? I despise them.” 

“Yes, it is designed that way. Bureaucratic design. It’s outlined in _Burroughs Guide to Upright And Clever Gentledevil’s Working Behaviour,_ sixth edition. I have licked the texts.” 

“Paperwork,” she says, and glares at the Zee. 

***

In what universe will Rose Lalonde not be drunk at a time of celebration? A universe where she is too young, or just incurious; Kanaya supposes there must have been a time when Ms. Lalonde has not ordered her servants to bring up six bottles of Greyfields 1879, or a Greyfields 1882, or her Bottled Oblivion, or three bottles from every shelf of her mother’s cellar of wine. And of course Ms. Lalonde does not drink it all herself, and that is why there is no one to greet Kanaya when she approaches the house on Light Street after she has delivered the soul to Scratch. 

Scratch came to see her himself, to gaze at the bottle with Vriska’s trapped soul inside. He gave her his glassy, devil smile and patted her on the shoulder. It was not so long ago that she enjoyed his touch: enjoyed him taking her around the streets of Hell, showing her the way people dressed, their manners, their way of speech. But now she shrugged him off and, in the manner of a sullen Urchin adopted by a debutante, rolls her eyes. 

“Ah,” he said, “at last. My trick of light comes home.”

And he had the bottle labeled and taken away for storage. In a hundred years, perhaps some thief might steal that bottle away and crack it open, curious—and Vriska will be out again, more furious and more hurt than before. Or she will be exchanged for one thing or another, or transmuted, or dumped into the indifferent, frothing waters of Hades. 

She lets herself through the gates of the house, goes up through the back entrance to the parlor, and sees the entire household in drunken sleep on the floor, draped on the couches, servant and master alike in each other’s arms, happy to the point of senselessness. And as Kanaya steps around these men and women and persons of undetermined gender, she has pangs of remembrance: of France, of Italy, of the heated cities of Africa, times with Vriska that make her think, No, she certainly did not deserve what I did to her. All those other souls I took, who cares. But Vriska, at least, should have met a clean fate. I owed her that, at least. Something that would keep her from hassling me in the future. 

Then again, many things can happen over the years: rivers reverse, deserts bloom, gold rusts, and even Vriska Serket can be rendered inert and harmless. It is only a possibility. 

Up the stairs, where the lone awake maid is lugging Mr. Strider the younger to his room. Distracted, she does not notice Kanaya entering Ms. Lalonde’s room, and closing the door behind her. 

“Kanarrrrya!” Ms. Lalonde says from the desk—drunk, Kanaya thinks, then amends: was drinking heavily earlier, now is sipping wine to stave the inevitable hangover. She throws her arm back and almost topples backwards. “Missssshhhh Maryam. Oops. I slipped up.”

“I see you have cause for celebration,” Kanaya says. “And legs.”

“Oh, _thooooose_ things,” Ms. Lalonde says. “Oooose things. Yes. Legs. I’m wearing pants to celebrate.” 

Which explains why Mr. Strider was in the dress. Kanaya begins to pick up the stray articles of clothing in the room, no doubt left over from Mr. Strider’s recent ventures into the artful garment known as dresses.

“Lately I feel like I’m the only one making an effort in this relationship,” Ms. Lalonde says. “With the way you turn up here smelling like a sewer or a, uh, hmm. All the time.” 

“Have you even noticed I was gone?” Kanaya says, holding up Mr. Strider’s pantaloons between two fingers.

“Yesh. Yesh. Verily, I did.” Ms. Lalonde sits on the bed, and belches. “Blast it. I’ve drunk too much.” She tugs at the waist of her pants. They are surely her brother’s: look how unflattering the fit is around the hips! Ms. Lalonde’s hangover has just been transferred to Kanaya by wire order. “Do you want to know what it’s like, being soulless? For me. I know you’ve never experienced any other state. I understand you better now, I think.” She undoes a few buttons of her pants, then looks at Kanaya directly. “You really don’t regret anything.” 

Really? Is that what it is like? Just that? But Ms. Lalonde is already moving on. She props herself up on her elbows and says, “Kanaya. Why did I do it?” 

“For—why did _you_ do it?” The question baffles her for a moment. Why did Ms. Lalonde bargain her soul for octopus legs? Why does Ms. Lalonde have to ask questions pertaining to her burgeoning sense of self-awareness when Kanaya has been buffeted by one ‘why’ question after another for the past two weeks? She stretches her jaw. “Because you are foolish and young. Very foolish. And also very rash. And—” 

“Makes sense,” Ms. Lalonde says. She seems on the verge of sleep. Kanaya smooths her hair from her forehead, but Ms. Lalonde catches her by the wrist and says, “Do not think that you have bought me.” 

“Bought you?” she says. “Rose. I did this for myself.” 

“As long as we’re clear.” 

She kisses Ms. Lalonde’s forehead. She almost gets up to leave, but then remembers. “I have been locked from the Embassy.” 

“Were you? For brawling?” 

“I don’t brawl!”

“Okay. Stay here for the night, then. The day. Whichever. I missed you.” She closes her eyes, then opens them, as though she has realized something. For a moment Kanaya is worried she will tell Kanaya to stay away, to leave, lest someday Kanaya should repay her the way she repaid Vriska—but why fear this? Kanaya is a different person now, and Rose will never murder stupidly for no reason. Rose, sharp and sometimes snide, is a different creature who is probably now hoping Kanaya will let her have a sip of the 1879. Her hangover is just setting in. “Ow,” she whimpers. 

“There, there,” Kanaya sighs, and reaches for a bottle. “There, there.”


End file.
